IT’S HIGH TIME to arrest Fidel Castro. The next time the Cuban dictator travels abroad, foreign security officials should handcuff him and charge him with assassination, human rights abuses and torture.

In 1998, a Spanish magistrate attempted to bring former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to justice in Spain for the murder of Spanish citizens in Chile between 1973 and 1983. Today, we are witnessing the efforts in Belgium to try Israeli Prime Minister Ariel >Sharon for the massacre of 800 people at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps while he was Israel's minister of defense in the early 1980s.

And so what about Castro? Why hasn’t he been brought to justice? What makes him different?

What makes Fidel different, aside from the fact that he has killed far more people than Sharon and Pinochet put together, is that he is a communist tyrant, and communists are never held accountable for their crimes against humanity. That’s because the Western Left needs to keep its ideals alive – even though those ideals spawn genocide. For the Left, giving up the socialist faith is not an alternative.

It is no mystery, therefore, that there were no Nuremberg-type trials in Moscow after the fall of Soviet communism. Despite the tens of millions of human beings that were exterminated by the Soviet experiment, the Left could not allow its religion to come under scrutiny.

Since coming to power in 1959, Fidel has been personally involved in the assassination of hundreds of people. Many crimes that were committed in the 1970s and 1980s by Leftist guerrilla groups in Latin America can be brought directly to his doorstep.

The 1989 attack on the Argentine military barracks at La Tablada, which killed 39 people, was Castro’s responsibility. The guerrilla group which mounted that attack, the All for the Fatherland Movement, was organized, trained and financed by Cuba. Jorge Masetti, a former Cuban intelligence operative now living in France, confirms that Castro was behind the La Tablada massacre. He has also verified that many of the guerrilla groups that have carried out assassinations and massacres throughout Latin America have done so at Castro’s behest. The Colombian guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), for instance, derives its ideology, training and direction from Cuba.

Let’s also not forget the murder of three U.S. citizens, who were flying the “Brothers to the Rescue” planes, that were shot down by Cuban fighter jets in 1996. As the Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives in July, 1999 conclusively demonstrated, Castro gave the order for that killing.

All of this is not to mention Castro’s crimes against his own people. The Cuban dictator heads a ruthless tyranny. Cuban citizens do not have the right to travel freely in and out of Cuba. There is no freedom of expression. At least five thousand Cubans have been executed since the 1959 revolution. In the mid-1960s, Castro himself admitted to keeping 25,000 political prisoners. Torture is institutionalized. Many human rights organizations have documented the regime’s use of electric shocks, the incarceration of prisoners in dark isolation cells the size of coffins, and beatings to extract false confessions.

Stalin built his utopia with the Gulag; Hitler did it with Auschwitz. Fidel has distinguished himself in the same light with Los Pinos. The abominable nature of his regime is illuminated by the horrifying experience of Armando Valladaras, a Cuban poet who endured twenty years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom. His book, Against All Hope, which serves as Cuba's version of Solzhenitsyn's normal'>Gulag Archipelago, provides the most indicting and heart-wrenching account of Castro’s atrocious human-rights record.

The Cuban dictator himself knows that justice still exists. In 1998, when Pinochet was arrested on a trip to London, Castro was on a state visit to Lisbon. When his aides heard about Pinochet’s arrest, they cut short the tyrant’s planned visit to Spain and Portugal and immediately flew him back to Cuba.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, little six-year old Elian Gonzalez was found by fishermen floating in an inner tube off Florida's coast. One wonders what Elian’s mom thought about when she looked at her son for the last time before she drowned.

A Mussolini or Ceausescu-style ending is too good to be true in Fidel’s case, but one dares to hope for something second best. Let us hope that Castro decides to step outside of his prison camp just several more times.