If it is true that Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized to Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for falling for Fidel Castro’s faux gesture toward Israel — so it was reported by Ben Smith of Politico and followed up on by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic — then congratulations are in order to the both the Israeli leader and the congresswoman and, for that matter, the two reporters.

Earlier this year Mr. Castro had claimed to Mr. Goldberg that, despite his regime having thrown in with Israel’s enemies all these years, he believes Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. “Yes,” Mr. Goldberg quoted him as saying, “without a doubt.” Mr. Goldberg also quoted the dying dictator as rebuking the Iranian regime for its Holocaust denial and expressing admiration for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, the premier historian of the Spanish inquisition.

Both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, reacted warmly to Mr. Castro’s come-on. But there were those who saw through Mr. Castro’s gambit as a typical Bolshevik-type trick. Among them was one of the savviest of the reporters on the Latin American beat, Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal.

“[H]ow believable is a guy whose revolution all but wiped out Cuba’s tiny Jewish community of 15,000, and who spent the past 50 years supporting the terrorism of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Syria, Libya and Iran?” Ms. O’Grady wrote. “And how does Castro explain Venezuela, where Cuban intelligence agents run things, Iran is an ally and anti-Semitism has been state policy in recent years?”

Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen apparently had a similar reaction, according to Politico’s Mr. Smith, who reports that she communicated her reaction to the Israelis and received an apologetic phone call from the prime minister — “which,” Mr. Smith added, “appears effectively to have squelched the unlikely dialogue with Cuba.” And none too soon, we’d add. Ms. Ros-Lehtinen is a rising power in the Republican majority in the new House, which gives ground for optimism that the Congress will stand fast with the embargo of the communist regime in Cuba.

Israel is a small, beleaguered democracy in need of all the help it can get. The exiled Cubans who have been holding out for democracy on their native island are logical allies. And vice versa. How tragic it would have been were Israel to have made a separate peace with the communist regime, all on the notion that a dictator who has for two generations oppressed his own people and joined in the war against the Jews had suddenly come down with a change of heart.