The groupthink is prevalent on both sides of the aisle - you're either on my team or you're on the other. What sucks is when you're ostracized from both.
Agreed the sanctions were unproductive. More than anything else, US sanctions helped Castro stay in power for half a century.
But to blame the sanctions for his atrocities - or to say the good he did outweighed the bad - is to be willfully blind: When Cuban government ships spotted a tugboat full of refugees headed for Florida on July 13, 1994, they blasted it to pieces with high-pressure fire hoses. “Our tugboat started taking on water,” recounted one of the survivors, María Victoria García. “We shouted to the crewmen on the boat, ‘Look at the children! You’re going to kill them!’ And they said, ‘Let them die! Let them die!’” Forty-one of the refugees did. [2]
While you write about the good things he did from your comfortable home with high speed internet, with the rule of law in a capitalist liberal democracy, this is how desperate his citizens were to leave this country of “good things”, and how barbarous was Castro against his own people.
[1] https://twitter.com/YvonneMConde/status/802587003057410048 [2] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/...
Fidel was a tyrant, that's for sure. But lack of tyranny has hardly prevented American atrocity, often wrapped in layers of policy, plausible deniability, and indirection of responsibility. It's far easier for us to think of our voters and leaders as mostly good people, whereas Fidel personally owns all of the excesses of the Cuban state.
Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed much of the suffering (the "millions" not the "thousands") was directly caused by US actions, so don't come with the holier than thou.