Putting Cuba and North Korea in the same basket is wildly misleading.
Although Cubans do not enjoy complete political freedom, most people there have a higher standard of living than before the revolution, almost everyone knows how to read and write and most social services are free (Cubans have better healthcare than US citizens).
The 80% poor may have had their standard of living raised by the revolution in 1959 but the rich and middle class had it lowered. In the 55 years since, the standard of living of the middle class and opportunities for the young in other similar countries has advanced past Cuba's while Cuba has stagnated and remained a 1970s soviet-like low-tech state.
I really did not mean to put them in the same basket. I simply said (which applies to North Korea as well) that "Cuba is above all a curiosity, a place semi-frozen in time, where ingenuity is no luxury, if you want to live."
Although Cubans do not enjoy complete political freedom, most people there have a higher standard of living than before the revolution, almost everyone knows how to read and write and most social services are free (Cubans have better healthcare than US citizens).