This spring (2003), Mr. Castro pushed his luck a little too far. Three young men, who had tried to highjack a ferry to flee to Florida, were executed after a mock trial. Seventy-five dissidents, whose only crime was to ask for a referendum on constitutional reform, were sentenced to terms as long as 28 years to rot in those abominable Cuban jails where the Red Cross hasn’t been allowed for 15 years.

For nearly 50 years, Fidel Castro has enjoyed a special status: Cuba’s president for life has been the only dictator whose crimes went unnoticed by most Western governments.

When he showed up at Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s funeral service in Montreal, he was wildly applauded, as if he were still the young fiery leader who had just won a heroic guerrilla war.

He’s been the darling of the intellectuals, who systematically ignored the Cuban dissidents’ desperate pleas for help. Even as horrific tales of repression came out of the island, Fidel Castro would remain the romantic hero who dared defy the American giant — a compelling argument, especially in Canada.

This spring (2003), Mr. Castro pushed his luck a little too far. Three young men, who had tried to highjack a ferry to flee to Florida, were executed after a mock trial. Seventy-five dissidents, whose only crime was to ask for a referendum on constitutional reform, were sentenced to terms as long as 28 years to rot in those abominable Cuban jails where the Red Cross hasn’t been allowed for 15 years.

The European Union is finally reacting, and just voted a series of measures to come to the aid of the Cuban dissidents. France is reconsidering its co-operation with the Cuban regime. Some of the left-wing intellectuals in South America, longtime fellow travellers of “Fidel,” now are having second thoughts about the real nature of the Cuban regime. Even the Belgian self-proclaimed tribunal on crimes against humanity has added Mr. Castro’s name to its blacklist, a remarkable event since its judges used to focus exclusively on men of the right, such as George Bush, Ariel Sharon and Augusto Pinochet.

But the hardest blow came from the French left, more precisely from Laurent Fabius, a prominent member of the Parti Socialiste who served as prime minister under the presidency of François Mitterrand.

“Dictators are neither right nor left, they are simply dreadful,” Mr. Fabius wrote in a scathing article for the left-leaning weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

Mr. Fabius stigmatizes the left for believing that criticizing Cuba would serve U.S. imperialism. “False!” he says. “The Americans have an interest in being the only opponents of the Castro regime because they will have greater access to the island’s resources when the regime falls. In any case, we must define our attitude by ourselves, not according to what other governments are doing.”

Mr. Fabius wants the French government to demand the immediate liberation of the Cuban dissidents and to support the candidature of Oswaldo Paya, a critic of the Castro regime, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Fabius also calls for France and Europe to force change on the so-called Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, of which Cuba and other repressive regimes are members, and which is now presided over by . . . Libya. “Only countries that respect human rights should be admitted to this commission,” Mr. Fabius writes.

This advice also applies to Canada. It’s not enough for the Prime Minister to sheepishly condemn the recent acts of repression in Cuba. Words are not enough.

Of course, Canada was one of the first beneficiaries of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. The island became a profitable market for Canadian businessmen, free from U.S. competitors, as well as a cheap winter paradise for Canadian tourists. Nowadays, the only home-grown industries that prosper in Cuba are tourism and underground prostitution. Just like under the previous Batista dictatorship from which Mr. Castro was supposed to have liberated Cuba.