The Cuban government is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution by repeating what it has emphasized for decades: that it has made great advances in education and health care, in spite of bullying from America.

Just how fine Cuba’s public-health and education advances have been cannot be known with precision until Cuba has a free press. There have been few on the island who have dared to examine the boasts of the dictatorship publicly and in great detail.

Fifty years into the Castro regime, Cuba remains a dictatorship with a vigorous secret police and prisons for dissenters. The Castro brothers — mainly Raul, 77, now that Fidel, 82, has health problems — rule without the benefit of real elections. Whatever the well-to-do Castros choose to “give” to the people comes at a terrible price. Cubans are denied basic opportunities to make choices about their lives and their government and to read and say what they want.

History shows that such repressive regimes usually do poorly economically, since they suppress the energy of their people. Cuba, once one of most prosperous nations in the Western Hemisphere, has withered under its government central planners. Its 11.2 million people earn an average of $20 a month. Many survive on money and goods shipped by relatives from the United States. Hurricanes last year further battered the fragile economy.

The country is still enduring the “Special Period in Peacetime,” the government’s designation for the economic crisis that began in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had spent billions of dollars propping up an adversary of America so close to its shores.

Meanwhile, the United States should end its embargo on trade with Cuba, a punishment directed at the Castro regime in the 1960s for stealing U.S. property and denying human rights. The embargo seems mindlessly punitive; it has failed to help the people of Cuba enjoy a freer society, with greater respect for individual rights. Indeed, it has handed the Castro regime a perpetual propaganda tool — the opportunity to blame all of its failures on America, an opportunity it ceaselessly exploits.

Especially for a nation so close to our shores, opening up trade would tend to open up the rest of its society, too. Greater trade and other new interactions with Americans would relieve some of the misery on that island, and rouse citizens to seek more freedom and opportunity in the years to come.