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The world-wide debate on Communism is over and the Communists lost.
Sure, they killed around 100,000,000 people, and that's kind of bad.
Worse than that, they encouraged the notion that central planning is a productive way to manage an economy. In doing so they guaranteed that the work and lives of 2,000,000,000 people would be less productive.
It's unlikely that all nations of the world could be as productive as the US, which is a pretty productive culture. But look at what the last fifty years have done for Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Imagine what the world would be like today if the people of China and India saw a similar increase in productivity. Imagine if their ideas, their energy, their work was put into a productive system and not just wasted.
Yes, we'd have a lot more problems... but we'd also have a lot more solutions, a lot less hunger, a lot more medicine, a lot more culture, a lot more education, a lot less desperation.
About 20 years ago the Chinese leaders took notice that their economy had fallen so far behind the West that something had to be basically wrong with their approach, and since then they have introduced capitalistic reforms and the result is a booming China like nobody can believe.
And to make claims for Cuba today is to ignore the vital Cuba that was before Castro came along. The Cuba that wound up supported by the former USSR for decades, and the hundreds of thousands of people who survived being infants in the system long enough to desperately want to escape as adults.
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