Investing to make that happen seemed like a good idea to the US Agency for International Development (USaid).

USaid gave $65m, between 1996 and last year, to 36 groups of Cuban dissidents based in Florida, to help them support democracy in their homeland.

Now, $65m will buy a lot of democracy. Just think of the wonders the dissidents could have freighted into Havana and its environs.

They could have smuggled in electronic voting machines, to demonstrate the thrill of doing your deed, secure in the knowledge that you've left no paper trail.

They could have mailed in a few hanging chads, with explanations attached. They could have dropped leaflets pointing out how simple democracy is in the United States, compared with countries such as Ireland, where you have to learn about the importance of a first preference in a marginal four seater whose boundaries were redrawn since the last election.

They could have dumped copies of Bill Clinton's autobiography in the mountains for covert distribution and sneak-reading by torch under the bedclothes.

Even the RTE Guide would have come in handy, if only to demonstrate that in countries where TV is run for the advertisers, rather than for the government, no political leader ever gets the chance to do Castro's three-hour televised rants.

What distinguishes democracy is that political leaders get subjected to the televised rants of others and to interviewer's questions that sometimes feel as if they last three hours.

The Cuban dissident organisations ignored the electronic voting machines and theRTE Guide. Instead, as a Congressional audit found out, the money from USaid got spent on Godiva chocolates, cashmere sweaters, leather coats and computer games. Oh, and crab meat. The crab meat doesn't seem to fit the rest of the items, but one of the groups which received anything up to $7m spent some of it on crab meat. Not steaks.

Not caviar. Crab meat. Go figure.

Before you say "evil thieves, to so misappropriate money designated to achieve democracy in their homeland", you should be aware that the dissidents living in Miami and Fort Lauderdale didn't scoff the chocolates themselves or wear the leather coats over the cashmere sweaters when riding the mountain bikes.

(I forgot the mountain bikes. They, too, were purchased to carry the democratic message. ) They packed them all up, every truffle and wheel and stitch, and dispatched them to Cuba.

Some of them arranged to have the items distributed by US diplomats inside Cuba. The US government has protested a number of times in recent years that consignments destined for its diplomats were being hijacked by the Cuban government. Now we know why. Never mind those technical papers, let me have a little play with Lara Croftf When the Congressional Audit found all this out, it used searing phrases like "questionable expenditure" to describe where the money divvied out by a key agency serving the Bush administration's Cuban policy went.

The dissident organisations involved didn't take this lying down. The head of Accion Democratica Cubana said people in Cuba were often hungry and had a severe chocolate deficit. Plus, he rattily pointed out, Cuba could be cold, ergo needed sweaters, and he'd bought the cashmere jumpers in a sale.

Well, maybe. But what about the Nintendo GameBoys and the crab meat?

Another leading dissident wasn't backing down on them, either.

"I'll defend that until I die, " he stated. "It's part of our job to show the people in Cuba what they could attain if they were not under that regime."

He has a point. He does, you know. If you're an impoverished Cuban driving a 1963 Chevy held together with rubber bands and spit and fuelled with boiled sugar juice, which would you rather have . . . a civics lesson or a free-market luxury? Which would make democracy more attractive to you?

Gimme that GameBoy. . .

Richard Delevan is on leave