The Longest Romance (24 page)

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.

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.”

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 townspeople, 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

She has not been allowed into Cuba since that publication. Michael Moore, needless to add, faces no such ban.

Shortly before the Dengue epidemic CNN was granted its coveted Havana bureau, the first allowed to a U.S. network. Bureau chief Lucia Newman assured viewers: “CNN will be given total freedom to do what we want and to work without censorship.”
⁸

Hard-hitting stories immediately followed. At the height of the epidemic CNN featured Fidel's office in its “Cool Digs” segment of CNN's “Newsstand.” “When was the last time you saw a cup full of pencils on the boss's desk?” asked perky CNN anchor Steven Frazier. “And they do get used—look at how worn down the erasers are! Years ago, our host worked as an attorney, defending poor people.... He's Fidel Castro, Cuba's leader since 1959!”

“No dubious campaign spending here [in Cuba].” So reported Lucia Newman during the height of the Dengue epidemic, which coincided with some bogus elections. “No mudslinging—a system President Castro boasts is the most democratic and most honest in the world!”
⁹

Though two more epidemics have been reported by the Cuban
samizdat
press since 1997, CNN (along with NBC, CBS and ABC) has never seen fit to mention outbreaks of Dengue fever in Cuba.

Instead, in August 2009, CNN's report on Cuba's healthcare by Morgan Neill boasted on Castro's behalf: “Cuba's infant-mortality rates . . . are the lowest in the hemisphere, in line with those of Canada.”

“Amazing!” probably gasped the typical CNN viewer. And indeed, according to UN figures, Cuba's current infant-mortality rate places the country 33
^rd
from the top in worldwide ranking, directly above the U.S.

What CNN left out of its report was that, according to those same UN figures, Cuba in 1958 ranked 13
^th
from the top, worldwide. This meant that pre-Castro Cuba had the 13
^th
-lowest infant-mortality rate in the world. This put her not only at the top of Latin America but atop most of Western Europe, ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Today all of these countries leave Communist Cuba in the dust, with much lower infant-mortality rates.

And even plummeting from 13
^th
(under capitalism) to 33
^rd
(under Communism), Cuba's “impressive” infant-mortality rate is kept artificially low by, among other things, a truly appalling abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth. This is the hemisphere's highest, by far. Any Cuban pregnancy that even hints at trouble gets terminated.

The UN's World Health Organization has a fetish for infant-mortality figures, regarding them as the be-all and end-all of a nation's health index. And Castro, whose fiefdom was awarded a prestigious UNESCO award in 2000, reports carefully doctored—if not utterly bogus—figures on Cuba's infant-mortality rate to the WHO. Michael Moore's
Sicko
relies on these UN figures exclusively.