Happy anniversary to Fidel.

THE CASTRO revolution celebrates its 25th birthday, and the Cuban people live on their knees. Surveying the roster of particularly odious Third World despots, one draws up a select list of the very worst: Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Qaddafi, the Ayatollah. And Fidel Castro; yes, Castro assuredly makes the team.

Fancying himself a Third World Napoleon, he has sold his people to the Soviet Union and crushed their spirit. Body-bags containing the remains of his soldiers, Soviet mercenaries, return from distant African climes. His economy is a mess. His prisons hold an estimated ten thousand political prisoners, guilty of such crimes as trying to organize a union, refusing to be receptive to indoctrination, trying to leave the country, expressing "counter-revolutionary" views in--a poem. In places like the Combinado del Este prison near Havana they are kept in dark cells and barely sustained for years and decades and on a wretched subsistence diet of slop. Recently, five workers were condemened to death for trying to start a union, though their sentence was commuted to a merciful thirty years when the case drew international attention. In view of the conditions in Castro's jails, that probably means a death sentence anyway.

The idol of Westenr radical chic during the Sixties, Castro appealed to a decadent taste for political thrills, as a combination of bearded bohemian and Marxist revolutionary. More recently, his luster has dimmed, but he did achieve the singular distinction of being the only Third World Communist dictator ever to be condemned by Jan-Paul Sartre--over his imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla. Castro belongs in the very lowest circle of the twentieth-century political Inferno, frozen head down, along with Pol Pot, Qaddafi, and the rest, who are, in the words of Jonathan Swift, "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."