We must have been feeling a bit crazy last Tuesday when we decided to fly from British Columbia to Cuba two days later to attend Fidel Castro's funeral. My mother, Pat Schulz, was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the 1960s that sent delegations of working-class Canadians down to Cuba after the revolution.

These folks came back and met with Canadians in cities and towns across the country to explain how the Cuban dictator Batista had turned Cuba into a brothel and casino for rich Americans and mafiosos, and how the Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel and Che Guevara had overthrown Batista and were working to implement a socialist revolution.

Fidel Castro stands in a long line of great socialist leaders who betrayed socialism. The list pretty well includes all of them, from Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, to Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to Mengistu in Ethiopia.

In the name of the beloved masses, these revolutionaries became the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for genocide, famine, incalculable suffering, widespread torture and the deaths of tens of millions of workers for the crime of somehow displeasing their great leader.

Castro was not a mass murderer of the same order, though hundreds, maybe thousands, of opponents were executed in the early years. He also broke the hearts of the millions of Cubans who welcomed his revolution.