Moore ignores Cubans (Blogburst update)

UPDATE
For more from the "SiCKO" blogburst, go here.

The worst part about Michael Moore's visit to Cuba to film part of his new movie, "SiCKO," is not that he willfully allowed himself to become part of the Castroite propaganda machine's perpetual campaign to pimp for the Cuban health care system. (Although that is enough for me to consider dismissing, sight unseen, whatever otherwise legitimate points Moore makes in his movie about American health care.)

Or that to do so, he exploited rescue workers who became ill after they responded to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

What is most objectionable is that in going to Cuba, Moore ignored the Cuban people and their real experiences with the Cuban health care he arranged for the rescue workers, and believes we should replicate in this country.

Moore ignored the health care apartheid in Cuba, where foreigners and government officials — and idiot filmmakers from the United States — get one, maybe even pretty good health care. While most Cubans get this.

And of most concern, is that Moore ignored Cuba's political prisoners, each of whom represents the tremendous cost Cubans pay — their freedom — for "free" health care.

Moore reportedly went to Cuba to see if he could arrange for the 9/11 workers, who suffer from ailments caused by the contaminated air they breathed at Ground Zero, to get treatment at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo. Moore heard that suspected terrorists held at the base had received high-quality care, and figured the rescue workers deserved the same.

Moore may have a good point there.

But what Moore also should have reported is that the Cuban health care the 9/11 workers got is not what prisoners of conscience locked away in the gulag receive. In fact, as Committee to Protect Journalists reported last week, life in a Cuban prison only makes inmates sicker, and when it does, getting good care, for reasons mostly political, is impossible.

A common theme in the numerous profiles I have written about Cuban political prisoners — click on any of the names listed on the left — is how sick many of them are. Surely, some of them would be willing to trade places with al-Qaida members held at Gitmo, for the chance to finally get some decent health care.

No, Moore's film is not about Cuban health care or the dictatorship's political prisoners. He had his agenda, and the right to stick to it, and make the movie he was pre-determined to make. Maybe one day, someone else with the talent and marketing ability of a Michael Moore — only with more integrity — will produce an exposé of a Cuban prison.

However, the fact that Moore went to Cuba and portrayed its health care system in the best possible light in order to make a point about American health care — while ignoring the reality on the Cuban street, and in Cuban prisons — makes him at best, disingenuous, and at worst, a tyrant's tool.

I am going to try to see the movie this weekend. I will report back ASAP.