Cuba's state of hopelessness may be one of the factors leading to the island's high suicide rate of 24.8 per 100,000 people. Cuba had Latin America's highest suicide rate earlier this decade, and this year ranked fourth in the region, behind Guyana, Uruguay and Trinidad and Tobago, according to World Health Organization figures.

CURRENT SENTIMENT

Cuban officials admit that many Cubans complain about shortages and a lack of opportunities, but they claim that most Cubans support the revolution. I doubt that. What leads me to conclude that most Cubans would like a political opening and to enjoy basic freedoms?

First, because I heard many of them say so -- many of them with fear of being overheard -- when I was a frequent traveler to the island in the late '80s and early '90s. Second, because a surreptitious poll conducted in Cuba earlier this year by the International Republican Institute shows that nearly 70 percent of people aged 19 to 49 said they would like a democratic system with multiparty elections, freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Third, and most importantly, because the Cuban government has a well-oiled polling machinery. If the Castro regime thought it could win a free election, and that Cubans were so proud of the revolution's achievements, it would have allowed a free election long ago. If it hasn't done so, it's because it knows it would lose it.

So was it worth it to marginally improve some social indicators at the cost of lowering the island's overall standard of living?

Definitely not.

Other countries, such as Chile and Costa Rica, have reduced poverty to a minimum with much less social trauma.

In Cuba, nearly 1.5 million people were forced into exile, hundreds of thousands of children have been separated from their parents, thousands -- tens of thousands, by some accounts -- have died at sea while trying to leave the island, and millions in Cuba have been forced to do ''voluntary work'' cutting sugar cane in the fields or doing other chores as part of their revolutionary duties.

And that's without taking into account victims of political violence. A total of 2,077 Cubans died in Cuba's ''internationalist'' wars in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and other African countries, according to official figures cited by author Norberto Fuentes in his Autobiography of Fidel Castro.

In addition, the New Jersey-based Cuban Archive says it has documented 8,273 executions, extra-judicial killings and disappearances on the island since 1959. ''We have the names and sources for all these killings, and they are available on the Web,'' said Maria Werlau, the Archive's director.

The cost Cubans are paying in lost freedoms is enormous. There are more than 200 political prisoners, including 29 journalists arrested in 2003, according to human rights groups. Adolfo Fernández Sainz, one of the 29 journalists, is serving 15 years in prison for ''subverting the nation's internal order.'' At his trial, the government presented ''evidence'' of his crime confiscated at his apartment: an electric typewriter and prohibited books, including George Orwell's 1984.

My conclusion: The Cuban dictatorship has improved some social indicators, but other Latin American countries have done better in others without sacrificing basic freedoms, and with much less suffering. For Cubans, the revolution may have been justified, but it wasn't worth it.