Uncommon Sense

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.

A blogburst preview

Babalú earlier today offered a preview of what you will see a lot of next week on the Cuban blogosphere: A counter-attack of truth against Michael Moore's new documentary, "SiCKO," and how it reportedly portrays the Cuban health care system in a very positive — and thus, false — light.

Stay tuned for more.

"SiCKO" and the truth about Castrocare

One side effect of the release next week of Michael Moore's new film, "SiCKO," is the public may get to hear more about the Cuban health care system, and how "wonderful" and "free" it is.

Don't believe everything you hear or see on the screen.

Latin Business Chronicle reports:

In Sicko, the new movie by controversial writer-director Michael Moore, there is brief, 15-minute segment showing September 11 rescue workers getting treatment in Cuba. The movie, scheduled for a U.S. release next week, is aimed to be an exposé of the deficiencies of the U.S. healthcare system and the Cuba segment indicates that the Caribbean island has better healthcare than the United States.

Latin Business Chronicle asked several Cuba experts for their opinion on how good the Cuban healthcare system is and how it compares with the U.S. healthcare system.

"After many years of increasing disrepair, the Cuban health system is now in crisis," says Jorge Salazar-Carrillo, a professor of economics at Florida International University and expert on Latin American economies.

In reality, Cuba has three types of health systems, argues Jaime Suchlicki, the director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami and a leading expert on Cuba. One for the Cuban military, members of the Communist Party and leaders of the government. A second one is for foreigners who pay in dollars or foreign currency and a third one for the general Cuban population.

"The first two are excellent, with modern equipment and availability of medications," he says. "The third, which is for the majority of the Cubans, is a veritable disaster with poor equipment and few medications and in many instances without the availability of Cuban specialists."

Salazar-Carrillo agrees. While Cuba has a high ratio of family doctors per inhabitant, the actual offer for ordinary Cubans is low. About half of the doctors are being exported to the poor countries of the world for hard currency (mainly Venezuela), while a similar portion is at the service of the Cuban Armed Forces and their families, he says. "Thus, at present the real availability to the populace is meager," says Salazar-Carrillo. "Cuba does not train the standard proportion of specialists."

However, Cuba does rank well in international surveys on mortality, maternal mortality, and life expectancy, points out Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "Cuba ranks near the top on all these parameters in all of Latin America and I believe similar to the U.S. or just below," he says. "These are results obtained by addressing the basic public health issues of infectious disease control, basic nutrition and care for the high risk infants."

Nevertheless, even the official statistics are showing a worrisome trend. "For many years now, Cuba has been reported in the international health statistics as deficient in proteins and calories, even using the mendacious Cuban statistics," Salazar-Carrillo says.

This should not be surprising since milk is only distributed in Cuba to children under seven, those infirm, or over 65, he points out. "In the last decade and a half there have been several epidemics and the island is on the watch list of infectious disease specialists," Salazar-Carrillo says.

Read the rest here.

(Cross-posted at Babalú.)

Marianne Pearl, on the Ladies in White

One of my must-see movies this summer is "A Mighty Heart," the story of Marianne Pearl, whose husband Daniel, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, was murdered by al-Qaida while working a story in Pakistan. Even though the film stars Angelina Jolie — she, of the Ché Guevara tattoo — the story is compelling enough for me to overlook the bad choices of the lead actress.

Not widely known is that Marianne Pearl, herself, a journalist, is half-Cuban.

Last summer, she penned for Glamour magazine a profile of some of the most courageous women in Cuba, if not the world, the Damas de Blanco, or "Ladies in White."

It is worth another read:

On a bright Sunday morning in Havana, I watched as more than a dozen women dressed in white, each carrying a pink gladiolus, marched along Fifth Avenue, an elegant street lined with neatly trimmed shrubbery and mansions painted in faded pastels. It was a highly unusual occurrence in communist Cuba: a political protest, albeit a quiet one. There were no slogans to be heard, no signs to be read. The women said nothing, but their silence contained a significant cry for freedom.

They are known as the Ladies in White — the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of 75 political prisoners jailed in 2003 by Fidel Castro. The women were demanding the release of these men from prison. You could say they were staring down a dictator.

I visited Cuba in June — on the second stop in my journey around the world for Glamour — just weeks before Castro fell ill and threw the future of his regime into doubt. The protest I witnessed offered a poignant snapshot of a Cuba closing in on a half-century of life under communist rule. Ever since Castro came to power in the fifties, Cubans had grown used to waiting for things — waiting in line to collect rationed food, waiting to be reunited with loved ones who fled an oppressive regime, waiting for the embargo imposed by the United States to end. Waiting for history to turn this seemingly endless page and move on. In that atmosphere, the Ladies in White represent the rarest of breeds — Cubans who found a way to say, publicly: enough waiting.

The men they hoped to free were arrested for being peaceful activists for democracy and human rights, according to their relatives. Some were sentenced to up to 28 years. The government claimed the men were dissidents whose actions undermined the Cuban regime. For three years, the Ladies in White have marched on their behalf, almost every Sunday after mass at the church of Saint Rita, the Roman Catholic patron saint of lost causes. And they were still marching as of press time, despite the political uncertainty in the country. Their gatherings have come to embody the frustration of a people longing for freedom.

Maybe Jolie will make up for choice of body art by making a film about the Ladies in White.

Read the whole thing below the fold.

Cuban dictatorship gives "SICKO" two thumbs up

Suspicions, here and elsewhere, that filmmaker Michael Moore had allowed himself to be used by the Cuban dictatorship for propaganda are starting to be realized.

Just consider the recent endorsement from a top Cuban government official. I can see it on the posters now:

"There's no doubt that a documentary by someone of Michael Moore's stature will help the world see the deeply humane principles of Cuban society," Cuban Health Minister Jose Ramon Balaguer

"Deeply humane principles of Cuban society?"

You mean, like this?

How sick is Michael Moore? (UPDATED)

Pretty damn sick, especially when you consider who he looks up to.

I haven't decided whether I will go see Moore's sure-to-be-screed about the American health care system. On the one hand, I don't want him, or anyone he does business with — the studio, the movie theater, etc. — to profit from my labor. He can make the movies he want, I can stay home when I want.

On the other, as one who has taken more than a few shots at Moore because of his film, sight unseen, I want to see for myself exactly how he portrays Castro-style health care. My journalistic integrity says fair is fair, although I'm guessing my disgust with Moore will not be assuaged.

Maybe Moore's jaunt in Havana is just a small part of the film, not worthy of the efforts of those who write about Cuba, where there are so many consequential issues needing our attention. Ignoring him may be bliss.

However, now is not the time to let our vigilance down.

Moore's film matters not because of its indictment of the American health care system, which may be justified, but because it promulgates one of the foulest myths of the Castro dictatorship: That Cubans don't need freedom because they have such a wonderful health care system. That most of the publicity for the film is related to his adventure in Cuba demonstrates the continued allure of that fiction.

The Cuban system is not so wonderful, but more importantly, it is repugnant to believe that there can be something good about such a trade-off.

There is no valor in sacrificing your freedom for the greater glory of a tyrant, despite the presumptions of Moore and other Castro apologists for almost 50 years.

But then Moore did not sacrifice anything.

He got to leave the island. Most Cubans have no such right.

That Moore does not care, that Moore apparently believes Cubans under Castro are better off than Americans in the United States, makes him sick.

UPDATED, May 28, 2007

After giving it some thoughts, and reviewing some of the comments on this post left at Babalú, I've decided to see the movie the first chance I get.

Michael Moore supports U.S. at Gitmo

"Sicko," Michael Moore's new documentary about the American health care system, is out, so now movie-goers can see for themselves how the Cuban health care system is portrayed.

I am in no way going to excuse Moore's behavior - I still think he is using his general anti-Americanism to give the Cuban dictatorship an propaganda victory - but news reports today reveal one important detail about the film that had been missing from earlier discussions.

The purpose of the trip to Cuba, according to news reports on an early screening of the film, was so that emergency workers who got sick after 9/11 could get treatment at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo, where Moore said officials have bragged about the care they are providing suspected al-Qaida terrorists.

When he got no response, Moore took the patients to a Cuban hospital in Havana, where, with the cameras rolling, the Americans received their treatments.

Maybe for his next film, Moore can return to Cuba and make a film about the the medical care the prisoners -especially the prisoners of conscience, prisoners who suffer outside the glare of Hollywood megalomaniacs - are receiving in the jails outside of Gitmo's gates.

Fred Thompson's advice for Michael Moore

Former U.S. senator Fred Thompson recently published a scathing review of Cuba and Cuban health care, in part inspired by news of filmmaker's trip to Cuba to pimp Castro-style health care.

Moore today responded by challenging Thompson to debate him, an offer that Thompson declined. A wise choice, perhaps, considering the stature gap between the two.

But it's how Thompson dissed Moore that is classic:

Nicolás Guillén Landrián, the filmmaker mentioned by Thompson, died in 2003. The Miami Herald published an obituary:

Nicolás Guillén Landrián, one of Cuba's most important documentary filmmakers and a former political prisoner - accused of trying to assassinate Fidel Castro - died Tuesday in Miami of complications from pancreatic cancer.

He was 65.

Born in Camaguey, Guillén - who is also the nephew of renowned Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén - directed 18 documentaries at Cuba's film institute between 1961 and 1972, and won several prestigious awards at film festivals in Europe. But many of his films were subtly critical of the Castro regime.

In his 1968 documentary, Coffea Arábiga - a satire of Fidel Castro's attempts to make Cuba a coffee-producing nation - the filmmaker showed Castro making a speech with the Beatles tune The Fool on the Hill playing in the background.

He was then accused of plotting to kill Castro and was sent to prison for two years. His name and contacts in the intellectual world returned him to the Cuban film institute, but he was expelled in 1971 - accused of ideological deviancy - and confined to mental institutions, where he was subjected to electroshock, for nearly 10 years.

"He is the only Cuban cinematographer who was sentenced to imprisonment,'' said Alejandro Ríos, a professor at Miami-Dade College and director of the school's Cuban Film Series. Ríos puts Guillén in the top three documentary filmmakers to come out of the island, along with Santiago Alvarez and Sara Gómez.

"He was way ahead of his time with the images he used,'' Ríos said. "He reminds people of MTV because of his technical form, his style. But this was the 1960s.''

Read the whole obituary below the fold.

What should be Michael Moore's punishment?

Filmmaker/Fidel afficiando Oliver Stone was fined for making an illegal trip to Cuba.

What should be Michael Moore's punishment if he is found to have done the same?

Rob at Say Anything has a good idea:

Personally, I think that if Moore is found guilty of violating the trade embargo with Cuba his punishment should be having to actually use a Cuban hospital when his heart inevitably begins to give out under the strain of all those Cheetos and milkshakes. And I’m sure he’d be happy to. Since, you know, communist health care is so much better than our American system.

(H/T Human Events)

Open wide, Fidel

Michael Moore is ready to give you what you have been waiting for.