For this they went to George Utset, whose website and pictures had originally impressed them. George now turned to contacts inside Cuba. The evidence was to come from the very belly of the beast, in the form of smuggled videos. Michael Moore’s reputation inside Cuba greatly helped the clandestine project. In September 2005 Fidel Castro had hailed Michael Moore as “that outstanding American!” while Fahrenheit 9-11 was repeatedly featured on Cuba’s state TV. Castro’s subjects were as appalled by Moore as their oppressors were enamored. Then Sicko confirmed the worst.
The American millionaire “documentarist” struck many Cubans as a simple accomplice to their oppression—one of many. Worse, the Castroite propaganda in Sicko was obviously reaching millions worldwide. So, imagining that the truth could reach millions of Americans via ABC’s “20/20,” Cubans risked their lives by using hidden cameras to film conditions in Cuban hospitals—but only those hospitals that were genuinely Cuban, meaning that they served Cubans.
Ninety-nine percent of Cubans have no more experience with a hospital like the one featured in Sicko than Michael Moore has with a Soloflex. Most Cubans view a hospital like the one featured in Sicko the way teenage boys used to view Playboy magazine or husbands view a Victoria’s Secret catalog: “Wow! If only...!”
But getting the truth out isn’t easy. In 1997 Cuban doctor Dr. Dessy Mendoza was on the phone with a Miami radio-station reporting an outbreak of Dengue fever in eastern Cuba, near Guantanamo, when Castro’s police stormed his house and arrested him. He was charged and sentenced for “spreading enemy propaganda.” The Cubans who collaborated with Michael Moore are obviously immune to this charge.
“Self-censorship is a very common practice,” wrote Spanish TV correspondent Vicente Botin about the daily habits of foreign correspondents in Cuba. “No one on the island can write the truth of what happens there.” The regime is suspected by most foreign correspondents of “electronically monitoring their phones, cars and homes,” and keeping close tabs on their “political ideas, their preferences, their tendencies and above all their weaknesses like drugs, sex, alcohol.”1
Lapses in this self-censorship are quickly addressed. In March 2007 Gary Marx of The Chicago Tribune, Stephen Gibbs of the BBC, and Cesar Gonzalez-Calero, of the Mexican newspaper El Universal, were all booted from Cuba. The regime cited their “lack of objectivity.” They got off easy.
In September 2011 Spanish filmmaker Sebastian Martinez was arrested by Castro’s police and sentenced to seven years in prison. Martinez had produced a film on Cuban child prostitution. But he managed it without the regime guidance and help so valued by Stephen Soderbergh, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Moore, Robert Redford, Oliver Stone, etc. The Castroites learned of Martinez’s documentary only when it ran on Spanish television. On his very next visit to Cuba they nabbed Martinez and threw him in the KGB-designed prison complex named Villa Marista.
Robert Redford, on the other hand, before releasing The Motorcycle Diaries, held a private screening in Havana for Fidel Castro and Che’s widow Aleida. Redford got an appreciative go-ahead from both. On his frequent subsequent visits to Cuba, this fervent Hollywood proponent of artistic freedom has always found himself feted by the Stalinist regime that has jailed and exiled more writers and filmmakers than any in the Western Hemisphere.
Cuba’s “Law of National Dignity” mandates jail sentences of three to ten years for “anyone who, in a direct or indirect form, collaborates with the enemy’s media.” And as you might guess, the definition proves quite broad and elastic. Joke-maker Chevy Chase didn’t seem to be joking when he gushed that “Socialism works. I think Cuba proves it.”2 But this working Cuban socialism means that Cubans who chose Chevy’s (or Jon Stewart’s, Bill Maher’s, Kathy Griffin’s, Whoopi Goldberg’s, etc.) line of work are either unemployed or rotting in Cuban jails. The prison sentences for criticizing or ridiculing not only the Cuban president but any member of the Council of State or National Assembly can reach three years. And unlike apartheid South Africa or Pinochet’s Chile, for instance, Cuba puts its prisons strictly off-limits to inspection by any international organization like the Red Cross or Amnesty International.
Cuba’s Law of National Dignity also provides jail sentences for “anyone who, in a direct or indirect form, collaborates with the enemy’s media.” You’ll note that whenever CNN, ABC, PBS or NBC interviews a Cuban man-on-the-street, the interviewee has always “requested that we not use his last name.” Outside of regime apparatchiks and pampered tourists, the “Law of National Dignity” has made Cuba a nation of first names, at least as reported by the media.
SICKO SICKENS CUBAN DISSIDENTS
The Cuban hospitals showcased by Michael Moore exclusively serve rich foreigners and high Communist party officials. Watching Moore reading from Castro’s cue-cards by claiming these hospitals served average Cubans, knowing this propaganda would be spread worldwide and swallowed by many if not most, was more than many Cubans could stomach.
So, at enormous risk, two hours of shocking, often revolting, footage was obtained with tiny hidden cameras and smuggled out of Cuba by diplomatic pouch. The man who assumed most of this risk was Cuban dissident Dr. Darsi Ferrer, himself a medical doctor, who also talked on camera, narrating many of the video’s revelations. Dr Ferrer worked in the real Cuban hospitals daily, witnessing the truth. More important, he wasn’t cowed from revealing this truth to America and the world.
Alas, with the videos finally in their hands, ABC started getting cold feet. The “20/20” segment kept getting smaller and smaller. The impending explosion made a Havana press bureau seem that much more precious, especially to ABC whose Havana staff, as mentioned, had already whimpered their objections to the health-care expose. They were unaware of the smuggled videos but many of their colleagues stateside apparently ”felt their pain.” They knew such a show would not make their Cuban hosts happy.
So more cutting and more paring ensued. On September 12, 2007 “20/20” ended up running a tiny segment on the matter, barely five minutes long and with almost none of the smuggled video footage.
Even so, viewer response was thunderous. “20/20” was deluged with congratulatory e-mails. ABC announced a follow-up show. The Cuban regime followed up also. The Cuban Communist party’s central committee called a meeting to discuss the issue, then called in ABC’s Havana bureau for talking-to.
Bottom line: John Stossel’s follow-up shows on Sicko included no mention of Cuba’s health-care.
Enter Fox News, and Sean Hannity in particular. After hanging up with George Utset I got on the phone with Fox News and notified them of the smuggled videos. They immediately requested a look. Two days later Hannity’s producers were busy editing, translating and subtitling. On October 10, 2007 they ran huge segments of the smuggled videos. Fox viewers saw naked patients covered with flies while lying on hospital beds consisting of a bare mattress. They saw hospital buildings that would be condemned by the health board of any U. S. municipality. They saw and heard Dr. Darsi Ferrer along with other Cubans who described their inability to obtain something as basic as aspirins.
Greed was the motif of Michael Moore’s Sicko. Among the highlights of the smuggled videos, Fox viewers saw Cubans being told by regime officials that aspirins and other medicines just might be available to them—but only if they paid in U.S. dollars, not the Cuban pesos they held out in desperation.
Dr. Julio Cesar Alfonso, a Cuban doctor who defected in 1999 after working within Cuba’s health-care system for years, reminded America of something that should have been blatantly obvious: “The treatment Moore and the rescue workers receive in the film [Sicko] was done specifically for them, because the regime knew it would make great propaganda.”3
Dr. Alfonso had barely finished his interview with The Miami Herald when some entity called “Havana Hospital” launched a website. “After being featured in the Cannes Film Festival-honored film Sicko, we are now open for medical tourism to Cuba,” says the site. “We welcome you with peace
and goodwill without any concern towards politics or propaganda. We are very good surgeons ready to help.” Among the featured bargains: “Breast augmentation /implants for only $1,500 (through the belly button procedure).”
So Michael Moore, champion of the poor, greatly boosted the boob-job business for Castro’s Cuba among Cannes Film Festival-goers.
As eagerly expected by Michael Moore’s Cuban collaborators, Sicko’s screening was the signal for their other propaganda assets to chime in. “Cuba has developed the world’s first meningitis-B vaccine, which is available in Third World countries but not in Europe or the United States due to U.S. sanctions,” reported Anthony Boadle from Reuters’ Havana Bureau shortly after Sicko’s release.
Of this 27-word sentence, exactly 14 words are true. This vaccine is not available in the U.S. and Europe, but hardly because of sanctions. In fact, in 1999, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department granted the pharmaceutical giant, SmithKline Beecham, a license to market the Cuban vaccine in a joint venture with Castro’s medical ministry—pending FDA approval.
And why not? Castro’s minister of public health himself, Carlos Dotres, had hailed the vaccine as “the only effective one in the world.” Highly impressed, Bill Clinton’s FDA chief, Dr. Carl Frasch, said it could annually prevent 1,000-2,000 cases of the dreaded disease in the U.S.; 110 members of Congress promptly signed a special letter to Secretary of State Madeline Albright, beseeching her to allow this breach of the diabolical embargo “if only to protect the lives of America’s children!”4
That was 12 years ago. As this book goes to press no effective vaccine against meningitis B exists. The reason the vaccine is not available today in the U.S. and Europe is simply that—like so many other Castroite concoctions and proclamations dutifully trumpeted by news agencies who earn Havana bureaus—the vaccine is a farce and its sale a swindle. And, at least in this case, most civilized countries refuse to help perpetrate the swindle on their citizens.
Some countries found out the hard way. “Brazil has wasted $300 million on a Cuban vaccine that is completely ineffective,” wrote Dr. Isaias Raw, director of Sao Paolo’s prestigious Butantan Institute, specializing in biotechnology.
A 1999 study by Brazil’s Center for Epidemiological Research seconded Dr. Raw: “The studies conducted on the use of the Cuban vaccine in children under four years old—the major risk-group for meningitis B—showed no evidence that the vaccine protected them against the disease. This vaccine should not be recommended.”5
The current medical literature as of 2012 flatly asserts that despite countless attempts, no effective vaccine against meningitis B has yet been developed.
Sadly for Michael Moore’s Cuban handlers, the medical establishment remains infested with men and women who stubbornly cling to their professional ethics. Enlisting their full cooperation presents challenges much more daunting than enlisting the cooperation of news-agencies panting for a Havana bureau, or of a portly filmmaker obsessed with vilifying his country.
THE VICTIMS OF “DOCTOR DIPLOMACY”
A few years back Castro launched his “doctor diplomacy,” wherein he started sending Cuban doctors to heathen lands (while their spouses and children were kept hostage in Cuba) to heal the sick and raise the dead. This was coupled with free treatment of poor foreigners from the Caribbean and Latin American nations in Cuban hospitals. The scheme has gotten no end of gushy reviews in the mainstream media.
Some reviews from the non-major media might help with perspective. Here’s one from the Jamaican newspaper, The Gleaner, entitled “Eye Surgery Hopes Dashed; Patients Suffer Complications After Cuba”: “The survey included 200 patients [Jamaicans who traveled to Cuba for eye surgery], and of that group, 49 patients—nearly a quarter—experienced post-surgery complications. According to Dr. Albert Lue, Head of Ophthalmology in Jamaica’s Kingston Public Hospital, the complications causing the patients’ impaired vision was corneal damage and damage to the iris due to poor surgical technique.”
Brazil also got a bird’s-eye view of Cuba’s vaunted “doctor diplomacy.” An April 2005 story from Agence France-Presse entitled “96 Cuban Doctors Expelled from Brazil” reported: “Federal Judge Marcelo Bernal ruled in favor of a demand by the Brazilian state of Tocantins’ Regional Council on Medicine that Cuban doctors be prohibited from practicing in their state.” Based on the results they’d achieved with Tocantins’ residents, the judge referred to the Cuban doctors as “witch-doctors and shamans. We cannot accept doctors who have not proven that they are doctors.”
According to a report by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, more than 75 per cent of “doctors” with Cuban “medical degrees” flunk the exam given by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates for licensing in the U.S.
Most Cuba-certified doctors even flunk the commission’s exam for certification as physician assistants, making them unfit even as nurses in the U.S. None of this is meant to disparage the hapless men and women who were simply cursed by fate to be born under a Stalinist tyranny, who took it upon themselves to overcome that curse and who today enjoy the blessings of liberty while employed in other fields. These are simply facts which Michael Moore’s Cuban case-officers are desperate to hide.
A PBS report from Havana makes this assertion: “One of Cuba’s greatest prides is its health-care system. And, according to the World Health Organization, the country has much to boast about. There are twice as many doctors per person in Cuba as in the United States. In fact, it’s the highest doctor-patient ratio in the world. How can one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere provide free care and achieve such impressive health outcomes?”
Maybe because PBS is basing this impression on claims by a Castro-regime apparatchik—and not a low-level one.
Marzo Fernandez, an economist who until defecting in 1996 served as secretary-general of Castro’s ministry of nutrition, was somehow overlooked by PBS for its special report. He elaborates on some impressive health outcomes also overlooked by PBS and its Cuban handlers.
“The average height of Cubans has decreased by eight centimeters in the past 25 years,” he reported on Miami television in October 2010. “For the first time in Cuban history, thousands of microcephalic children [abnormally small heads in proportion to their bodies] due to protein [primarily milk] deficiencies have been found in the eastern provinces.”
RECEIVING IS BELIEVING
In 1996 Katherine Hirschfield, an Oklahoma University doctoral candidate, undertook a study of Cuba’s vaunted healthcare—but as a participant rather than as a regime-escorted scholar. Her plan was to live for a year with a Cuban family in Cuba’s second-largest city of Santiago. From this embedded position she would “observe the ways Cubans behaved with respect to health and disease in their everyday lives . . . and also observe the workings of family-doctor clinics in the area.”
As she explained it: “From the local community and the clinics I would finally I would draw a series of case-studies that best exemplified the social and cultural dynamics of Cuba’s health care.”6
Typical of scholarly studies that include a visit to Cuba, Hirschfield’s study comes with this admission: “My project was intended to document and highlight Cuba’s achievements in Social Medicine.” (Hence her lightning-quick visa clearance.)
Shortly after settling in with her Cuban hosts, Hirschfeld found her immediate neighborhood full of Cubans suffering from Dengue fever. She kept hearing of nearby areas in a similar condition. But upon every enquiry to the Castroite authorities (which included most of the doctors in the area) she was told that Dengue, though rampant during the unspeakable Batista era (when in fact it was virtually unknown), had been eradicated by the glorious revolution shortly upon its triumph. She was imagining things. This American woman was obviously hysterical. Cuba’s Ministry of Truth had spoken.
Recall how, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dr. Bennell and a few folks who had caught on to the pod-people epidemic tried warning the townsp
eople, only to be accused of lying or falling victim to an “epidemic of mass hysteria.”
Soon Hirschfield herself caught Dengue fever and was ushered into a crowded, filthy clinic, swarming with mosquitoes and guarded by soldiers. The crowding testified to the obvious epidemic of Dengue fever then ravaging eastern Cuba and denied by authorities; while the soldiers told of the regime’s craving to keep the epidemic secret.
Many of the infected Cubans were unable to walk; so the walking-wounded among the patients, including Hirschfield, were helping the disabled ones. No nurses were in evidence, no doctor was provided to Hirschfeld, and no medication was offered. “One day they finally did do a blood draw,” writes Hirschfield. “But they sterilized my arm with rum because there was no disinfectant.”
Infected herself, and in a hospital crammed to suffocation with Cubans suffering horribly from the disease, Katherine Hirschfeld took a cue from Groucho Marx and decided to believe her eyes rather than Castro’s Ministry of Truth.
Then she tried phoning her family from Cuba to inform them of her plight; but Soviet-armed soldiers prevented the call. Recall how, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Bennell tries to place a long-distance call to get word out about the pod-people but the local operator nixes the call.
“The experience left me skeptical of official Cuban government communiques regarding health care,” says (the obviously understated) Dr. Hirschfeld.
Hirschfeld said she “feared the intense politicization of certain sectors of the [Cuban] exile leadership.” She said she “had also noted several dismissive and disparaging comments about Cuban exiles.” Hence, she “feared this would lead mainstream academics to dismiss my research.” Withal, she published her findings in a book entitled Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898.7
The Longest Romance Page 17
