Perhaps those “New York-based VIPs” headed to hobnob with Castro, mentioned in A.L. Bardach’s Newsweek International “Global Buzz” column last week, will rethink their travel plans in light of the summary executions meted out Friday to three Cuban dissidents. The dissidents — Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Barbaro Leodan Sevilla Garcia, and Jorge Luis Martinez Isaac — were executed at Fidel Castro’s orders after attempting to hijack a ferry to America, and to freedom, on April 2.

Dissidents in Cuba, of course, are pushed to hijacking by the reality that there is often no other way to leave their island prison. Just the month before the ferry hijacking for which the three paid with their lives, a group of men hijacked an airplane to Key West, Florida, from Cuba’s Isle of Youth. Ten people on that plane opted to leave their lives in Cuba behind to stay in America; 19 returned to Cuba. How many of the 50 passengers on that ferry would have made their break for freedom had the hijackers been successful in reaching America?

That’s a question that Yoko Ono — the head of the group set to break bread with Mr. Castro, according to Newsweek — and her companions, who have yet to make their identities known, would do themselves a service to contemplate in coming days. The Hollywood and New York elites’ love affair with the Cuban dictator has become something of a cliché. This trip is only the latest in a series of pilgrimages by the likes of Ted Turner, Kevin Costner, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Graydon Carter, and Les Moonves. Likewise, Mr. Castro’s current crackdown on opposition is the very caricature of dictatorship — so far at least 75 journalists, librarians, and other critics of the government have been arrested and sentenced to as long as 28 years in prison.

The perfunctory trials of the ferry hijackers occurred on Tuesday, were followed by appeals on Wednesday, with sentences carried-out — rubber stamped by the 31-member Council of State, with that 31 st member being Fidel Castro — on Friday. Typically, executions are carried out by firing squad in Cuba. Aside from those executed, four men received life sentences in Cuba’s brutal prisons; one can only guess that these four received the harsher sentence.

It is illuminating that in the current climate, with the horrors of the Saddam Hussein regime on the minds of Americans, Mr. Castro’s cronies have kept their heads down. It can be hard for many Americans to believe, in this free country, that true monsters and monstrous governments actually exist. But they’ve been reminded that they do. And Mr. Castro differs from Saddam only in the size of the prison he runs.