Charley Reese
King Features

Since high on the agenda of the leftist Clinton Administration is relieving Fidel Castro of his economic problems, there are some things you should keep in mind.

First, Fidel Castro is not a normal human being. He is mentally sick, a pathological psychopath who from childhood has burned with hatred for the United States. This guy, don't forget, screamed and hollered for the Soviets to launch nuclear missiles during the Cuban missile crisis. This assessment is not mine. It is what Cubans, both exiles and defectors, who have known him intimately say about him.

All of them believe that, if Castro thought he was about to go down, he would launch some type of attack against the United States. He has honeycombed the Cuban cities with tunnels. He has invested heavily in biological research. He could easily get biological toxins into the United States.

In short, this psychopath -- who is often compared to Hitler even by his former revolutionary comrades -- is a dangerous man.

A second point to keep in mind is that the poverty in Cuba is not the result of the U.S. embargo. Castro himself is listed by Forbes magazine as a billionaire, worth about $1.4 billion. Prior to Castro, Cuba had the second-highest standard of living in all of Latin America. Castro and his communist policies have destroyed the economy and lost support of 80 percent of the people, even those born after he came to power.

He runs a system of slavery. Here is how it works: Foreign investors who need employees for a hotel, for example, must pay Castro in dollars. He then supplies the workers and pays them in worthless pesos. He charges foreign governments in dollars for Cuban soldiers or health workers and pays the workers in pesos. The guy is a cheap gangster.

For years, this vile tyrant lived off the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, he lost his subsidies. He uses the U.S. embargo as a propaganda excuse, though in fact he can and does do business with every other country in the world.

Cuban exiles believe we should keep the embargo as a card to play when Castro dies. To lift it and to allow Castro access to World Bank and International Monetary Funds would be to institutionalize communism. The dollars would go to him to strengthen his army, his secret police, his biological warfare research and to fund revolutionaries in other countries.

In fact, for the United States to save Castro would be insanely stupid and a cruel betrayal of the Cuban people. Unfortunately, the United States has a history of doing insanely stupid things and betraying people who desired only freedom.

The third thing to keep in mind is that the United States has an old, entrenched group of leftists and communists who have for years propagandized on behalf of Castro, just as earlier generations did for Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung and Josef Stalin.

Then there are the businesses that would sell coal to Satan. They will be pushing to save Castro just as they pushed to do business with communist China and Vietnam. As an Englishman observed long ago: Don't expect a corporation to have a conscience since it has neither a soul to damn nor a body to kick.

To help you counter the heifer dust put out by the Clinton administration, here are a few Internet sites where you can find legitimate information about the situation in Cuba: Free Cuba Foundation (www.fiu.edu/~fcf/), Independent Press Bureau (www.bpicuba.org), Cuban American National Foundation (www.canfnet.org), Cuban Catholic Church (www.nacub.org), and the Cuba Free Press Project (www.cubafreepress.org).

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Charley Reese's e-mail address is OSOreese@aol.com.