With the remains of the Berlin Wall a monument to human and political failure, and its former overseers subject to trial and public censure, it is easy to forget that people still suffer at the hands of their leaders and in some instances are held captive by their own governments.

Cuba, once a communist backwater, has become the Alcatraz of nations.

Three of Cuba’s prisoners — a mother and her two young sons — escaped over the weekend in a daring dusk rescue by their father, a former Cuban fighter pilot who two years ago defected to the United State in his Soviet MiG jet.

Saturday, he went back, as he said he would, for his family. Flying a borrowed Cessna, he penetrated Cuban air space, touched down on a highway outside Havana and whisked the three back to his adopted home.

The story of Orestes Lorenzo Perez, his wife, Victoria, and their two sons, Reyniel, and Alehandro, is inspirational. It is about timeless values, love and commitment, family and freedom, a promise kept.

The loser in this triumph, of course, is Cuba. The island nation and former Soviet satellite today is alone in this hemisphere and among a diminishing number of states internationally that cling to a worn-out doctrine fabricated on a flawed ideology.

There was nothing revolutionary in Castro’s vision of the radiant future. It was not one of prosperity and equality for the many, but about power and control by a few. Communism served to give despotism a fresh face.

Cuba has been losing people of Perez’s courage and creativity for more than 30 years. Spiritually or physically, they have left the system to find something better. It is slow defeat from within, by attrition. It produces a government with a hollow core. Like the time chosen by Perez for the daring escape, it is late twilight for Cuban communism.