Maybe there are two elephants in this room?

The dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan are not facing the same problems.

Nor the hideous racist regime in Israel.

Castro and I would not get along, I am a dissident by nature, so I cannot bring myself to support his regime. But we cannot blame the economic failures on Castro, now dead, RIP.

The Cubans have done well to survive more or less intact for this long in the face of the sanctions.

It is my belief, some one here may know better, that it was the sanctions that pushed Fidel into the Soviet camp in the first place. He was a nationalist, not really a communist to begin with.

Whatever he would still have been a hideous dictator like most of the surrounding countries.

Castro Inc. is the source of the problem in Cuba.

To look anywhere else really is to legitimize his corruption.

The fact is Saudi has Oil, meaning they can keep their population fed, also, their version of 'totalitarian' is cultural, not ideological. They've had similar rules for 1200 years. If it were not House of Saud it would be House of X, same thing.

And Israel is racist? But not the surrounding regimes who want to wipe them off the face of the planet, and have tried to do so on a few occasions?

Yes you absolutely can blame Castro and his hypocritical, corrupt, fanatical insistence on Marxist Leninist economic central planning and state control for the misery and poverty of Cuba. Castro ruled for decades, Cuba is only now slowly leaving his shadow. The U.S embargo was a disaster and a very stupid policy with some blame for Cuba's miseries but the majority of their ruin is very much their dictatorship's doing. I'm sorry, but to avoid this blatant causal relationship, shared by many other countries that never fell under major U.S sanctions but which did apply Marxist central planning, is to avoid the extremely obvious.

It is not the dictatorship, it's the economic system they're into. But people still believes communism makes countries thrive into wealth and freedom. They never give any example of successful communist country.