COLUMN LEFT/ ROBERT W. BENSON : An Island on the Way to Ecotopia : On human rights, Cuba’s record compares well to Mexico and others.

There is an island in the Caribbean where at certain moments you feel that you are wandering through the pages of “Ecotopia,” Ernest Callenbach’s novel about an environmental and egalitarian utopia. There are few cars and no smog. There are no graffiti, no commercial billboards and signs. The streets are cleaned, trash is picked up. Everything is recycled, nothing wasted: The truck that delivers a box of fruit and vegetables to the hotel restaurant takes away a box of banana peels and vegetable trimmings from the day before. Some communities get electricity from windmills and cow-dung slurries that generate combustible methane. Small dairy herds have been established and new fields planted to make the island self-sufficient in agriculture and break its dependence on cash crops for export.

There is no underclass of destitute people, no one begging for food or sleeping on the streets, no barefoot children with bellies swollen from malnutrition. The infant mortality rate is virtually tied with that of the United States and is much better than the rate in America’s inner cities. There is free medical and dental care for everyone, and the number of doctors per capita is one of the world’s highest.

Women have the right to choose abortion and the right to 18 weeks’ paid maternity leave. They constitute 56% of all working professionals. There are more female than male doctors and judges.

Most urban neighborhoods have free day-care centers and preschools, and education is free through university and graduate school levels; literacy is 98%.

The island is Cuba.

Five law students and I were there in January on our own initiative, invited by no one. We interviewed government officials, people on the street and hitchhikers we picked up when we rented a van and drove 400 miles through the countryside. We went about freely, with no “guides.”

We did not find the society that the Bush Administration’s pronouncements had led us to expect--a despondent populace filled with dread, living in misery and hanging on to the last threads of a tattered socialist economy toppling toward starvation. Most of the Cubans we met seemed filled with either resignation or optimism in the face of severe shortages caused by the demise of Soviet subsidies and the Soviet Bloc nations’ default on contracts for oil and food. Rationing is the way of life; there are long lines for everything.

Obviously, some people want to escape such conditions. While we were there, 34 Cubans flew to Miami in a helicopter. But you see nothing approaching the human misery, economic failure and environmental foulness that you see in Mexico, for example, or Nicaragua or Brazil--or Los Angeles, New York or Washington. In short, Cuba, despite its current economic crisis, leads the hemisphere in what international human rights lawyers call second-generation human rights: the rights to food, shelter, medical care and education. Moreover, forced into a crash program for conservation, Cuba is leading the way toward third-generation human rights: the right to a clean environment and resources that will be sustainable in our grandchildren’s lifetimes and beyond.

But is all of this being purchased at the cost of first-generation human rights: the rights to democratic government and civil liberties? There is no real competition for fundamental political power in Cuba, and there are outrageous violations of individual rights. Anywhere from several dozen to several hundred political dissidents are believed to be in jail. Cuba also has a history of homophobia, which may underlie its Draconian policy of forcing persons carrying the AIDS virus to live in special sanitariums. The situation demands reform. But Cuba’s human-rights record compares well to those of many of our allies--including our sweetheart trading partner, Mexico. Nor is there anything in Cuba comparable to the “disappearance” of 500 street children in Brazil last year at the hands of the police. In fact, our own history of dealing with dissidence that was judged subversive to “order” does not compare favorably with Cuba’s current actions.

None of this makes Cuba’s abuses any more tolerable, but it does raise the question of why the Bush Administration fulminates so furiously against Castro’s government. It’s no secret that the Administration’s policy is to snuff out Cuba’s achievements through economic blockade, and perhaps even through invasion by Miami extremists. Could that policy also be motivated by an irrational hatred of a society that has beaten the free-market countries in human economic and social rights and now may be, just may be, showing the way to Ecotopia?