Humberto Fontova: Sicko Propaganda
[Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.]
"We cannot for a second abandon propaganda" wrote Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954. “Propaganda is vital -- propaganda is the heart of all struggles.”
Michael Moore claims that Cuba's Stalinist regime played it as straight with him during the filming of Sicko, his new documentary, as he plays it with its viewers. “I asked them to give us [the 9/11 workers featured in the documentary] the same care they give their own Cuban citizens," he assured us. "No more, no less. And that’s what they did.”
You cringe at having to contest this in full public view. Does anyone with a fully-functioning brain actually believe it? Will I insult America's intelligence by pointing out something so appallingly obvious as the absurdity of Moore's claim? You would like to think the forthcoming refutation by Dr Julio Alfonso, a Cuban Doctor who defected in 1999, is too obvious to require publication and circulation. But sadly, history shows that Castro's propaganda (as disseminated by his agents, both on the payroll and off) has an odd--if mercifully temporary-- effect on cerebrums that otherwise function normally, even exceptionally. This effect is similar to the one sugar in the gas tank has on an automobile engine.
As a recent and tragic example of this phenomenon, recall that in April of 2000, after a Dan Rather 60 Minutes interview with Elian Gonzalez's father, polls showed that 70 percent of Americans firmly believed that this father -- a subject of a Stalinist regime who was surrounded by Castro plainclothes police while in the very CBS studio -- was acting completely free from coercion.
So let's go ahead and allow Dr. Julio Cesar Alfonso, who worked within Cuba's health-care system for years, to remind America of something that should be blatantly obvious: "The treatment Moore and the rescue workers receive in the film was done specifically for them, because the regime knew it would make great propaganda."
Dr Alfonso had barely finished his interview with the Miami Herald when something titled "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 banner. "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 are: "Breast augmentation/ implants for only $1,500 (through the belly button procedure.)"
99 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 teen-age boys used to view Playboy magazine: "If only!" For an accurate picture of what the average Cuban undergoes in healthcare, please visit the harrowing pictures smuggled out of Cuba (at enormous peril) and posted on TheRealCuba.com. If a picture is normally worth a thousand worth then these are worth a million.
In Sicko, Moore parrots the Castroite claim that Cubans live longer than Americans. In fact, the figures are practically identical, which actually casts Cuba's vaunted health care in a negative light. In all nations with high emigration rates longevity rates skew high. This occurs because the birth is recorded but the death gets recorded in the nation migrated to. So it seems like fewer people die. Naturally, the opposite effect appears in nations with a large influx of immigrants. The death is recorded but the birth was recorded in the nation immigrated from. So, generally speaking, a nation with high longevity but known to hemorrhage its people has little to boast about with regards to longevity figures. All they're proving is that theirs is a miserable place to live from which massive numbers of people flee.
And few nations hemorrhage people like Cuba. Almost 20 percent of its population since the glorious revolution. This 20 percent of Cuba's population, let's not forget, represents those who got out with the clothes on their back and against enormous odds. Had Cuba followed the norms of all civilized nations in allowing free emigration with family, property, etc. (as in pre-Castro Cuba, when almost nobody left), Cuba today (statistically speaking) would boast the highest longevity rates in the annals of man's history.
As eagerly expected by Michael Moore's Cuban case officers, 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 in the United States due to U.S. sanctions," reported Anthony Boadle from Reuters' Havana bureau last week. Of this 27 word sentence, by a news agency considered authoritative worldwide, 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, 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 "1000-2000 cases" of the dread disease in the U.S. 110 U.S. Congressmen 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!
That was eight years ago. 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 propagate the swindle on their citizens.
Some Third World countries discovered the swindle the hard way. "Brazil has wasted $300 million on a Cuban vaccine that is completely ineffective,” wrote Dr. Isaías Raw, director of Sao Paolo’s prestigious Butantan Institue specializing in Biotechnology. A study by Brazil’s Centro de Vigilancia Epidemiológica (Center for Epidemiological Research) from 1999 seconded Dr Raw: "The studies conducted on the use of the Cuban vaccine in children under 4 years old—the major risk group for hepatitis B—showed no evidence that the vaccine protected them against the disease. This vaccine should not be recommended.”
All current medical literature flatly asserts that despite countless attempts, "no effective vaccine against the Meningitis B has yet been developed." The pharmaceutical giant Novartis is currently testing one and claims to be close to its development.
Sadly for Castro, the medical establishment abounds 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 sympathetic news agencies and 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 (though their spouses and children were held hostage in Cuba) to heal the sick and raise the dead. This was coupled with "free" treatment of poor foreigners from the Carribbean and Latin American nations in Cuban hospitals. The scheme has gotten no end of gushy reviews in the major media.
Some less prominent reviews might add perspective. Especially as these report much closer-range observations of the scheme along with follow-ups. Here's one from the newspaper The Jamaican Gleaner titled, "Eye Surgery Hopes Dashed; Patients Suffer Complications," which notes: "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." "Since I come back, from Cuba," said George Foster, a 70-year-old Jamaican participant in the Cuban "Miracle Operation," "I can see from the right eye but I can't see from the left."
Brazil also got a birds-eye view of Cuba's vaunted "Doctor Diplomacy." "96 Cuban Doctors Expelled from Brazil” starts the April, 2005 story from Agence France-Presse. "Federal judge Marcelo Bernal ruled in favor of a demand by the Brazilian state of Tocantins’ Consejo Regional de Medicina (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, over 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. This exam is considered a cakewalk even by the graduates of Mexico’s Tec de Monterrey School of Medicine. Most Cuba-certified doctors even flunk the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates' exam for certification as "Physician Assistants," making them unfit in the U.S. even as nurses.
None of this is meant to disparage these hapless men and women who were simply cursed by fate to be born under a Stalinist tyranny, nor those who took it upon themselves to overcome that curse and who today enjoy the blessings of liberty while employed in other fields. I'm simply disclosing some facts Michael Moore's Cuban case officers are desperate to hide. Here are a few more:
According to the same report by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the mortality rate of Cuban children aged 1 to 4 is 34 percent higher than the U.S. (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1000). But these don't figure into U.N. and World Health Organization spotlighted "infant-mortality rates." So apparently the pressure (so far) is not on Cuban doctors to fudge these figures.
In April 2001, Dr. Juan Felipe García MD of Jacksonville, Florida, interviewed several recent doctor defectors from Cuba. Based on what he heard, he reported the following: "The official Cuban infant-mortality figure is a farce. Cuban pediatricians constantly falsify figures for the regime. If an infant dies during its first year the doctors often reports he was older. Otherwise such lapses could cost him severe penalties and his job."
Cuba's infant mortality rate, though it plunged from 13th lowest in the world pre-Castro to 40th today -- is also kept artificially low by an abortion rate of 0 .71 per live birth, the Hemisphere's highest by far which "terminates" any pregnancy that even hints at trouble.
More tragic still, the maternal mortality rate in Cuba is almost four times that of the U.S. rate (33 versus 8.4 per 1000). Peculiar how so many mothers die during childbirth in Cuba. And how many 1-4 year olds perish, while from birth to one years old (the period during which they qualify in U.N. statistics as infants) they're perfectly healthy.
At the very least, such statistics should lead people to question Cuba's official infant-mortality figures. They may not make for a flattering portrait of Cuba, but unlike Michael Moore’s documentary, they have the virtue of being true.
Read entire article at FrontpageMag.com
"We cannot for a second abandon propaganda" wrote Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954. “Propaganda is vital -- propaganda is the heart of all struggles.”
Michael Moore claims that Cuba's Stalinist regime played it as straight with him during the filming of Sicko, his new documentary, as he plays it with its viewers. “I asked them to give us [the 9/11 workers featured in the documentary] the same care they give their own Cuban citizens," he assured us. "No more, no less. And that’s what they did.”
You cringe at having to contest this in full public view. Does anyone with a fully-functioning brain actually believe it? Will I insult America's intelligence by pointing out something so appallingly obvious as the absurdity of Moore's claim? You would like to think the forthcoming refutation by Dr Julio Alfonso, a Cuban Doctor who defected in 1999, is too obvious to require publication and circulation. But sadly, history shows that Castro's propaganda (as disseminated by his agents, both on the payroll and off) has an odd--if mercifully temporary-- effect on cerebrums that otherwise function normally, even exceptionally. This effect is similar to the one sugar in the gas tank has on an automobile engine.
As a recent and tragic example of this phenomenon, recall that in April of 2000, after a Dan Rather 60 Minutes interview with Elian Gonzalez's father, polls showed that 70 percent of Americans firmly believed that this father -- a subject of a Stalinist regime who was surrounded by Castro plainclothes police while in the very CBS studio -- was acting completely free from coercion.
So let's go ahead and allow Dr. Julio Cesar Alfonso, who worked within Cuba's health-care system for years, to remind America of something that should be blatantly obvious: "The treatment Moore and the rescue workers receive in the film was done specifically for them, because the regime knew it would make great propaganda."
Dr Alfonso had barely finished his interview with the Miami Herald when something titled "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 banner. "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 are: "Breast augmentation/ implants for only $1,500 (through the belly button procedure.)"
99 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 teen-age boys used to view Playboy magazine: "If only!" For an accurate picture of what the average Cuban undergoes in healthcare, please visit the harrowing pictures smuggled out of Cuba (at enormous peril) and posted on TheRealCuba.com. If a picture is normally worth a thousand worth then these are worth a million.
In Sicko, Moore parrots the Castroite claim that Cubans live longer than Americans. In fact, the figures are practically identical, which actually casts Cuba's vaunted health care in a negative light. In all nations with high emigration rates longevity rates skew high. This occurs because the birth is recorded but the death gets recorded in the nation migrated to. So it seems like fewer people die. Naturally, the opposite effect appears in nations with a large influx of immigrants. The death is recorded but the birth was recorded in the nation immigrated from. So, generally speaking, a nation with high longevity but known to hemorrhage its people has little to boast about with regards to longevity figures. All they're proving is that theirs is a miserable place to live from which massive numbers of people flee.
And few nations hemorrhage people like Cuba. Almost 20 percent of its population since the glorious revolution. This 20 percent of Cuba's population, let's not forget, represents those who got out with the clothes on their back and against enormous odds. Had Cuba followed the norms of all civilized nations in allowing free emigration with family, property, etc. (as in pre-Castro Cuba, when almost nobody left), Cuba today (statistically speaking) would boast the highest longevity rates in the annals of man's history.
As eagerly expected by Michael Moore's Cuban case officers, 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 in the United States due to U.S. sanctions," reported Anthony Boadle from Reuters' Havana bureau last week. Of this 27 word sentence, by a news agency considered authoritative worldwide, 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, 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 "1000-2000 cases" of the dread disease in the U.S. 110 U.S. Congressmen 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!
That was eight years ago. 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 propagate the swindle on their citizens.
Some Third World countries discovered the swindle the hard way. "Brazil has wasted $300 million on a Cuban vaccine that is completely ineffective,” wrote Dr. Isaías Raw, director of Sao Paolo’s prestigious Butantan Institue specializing in Biotechnology. A study by Brazil’s Centro de Vigilancia Epidemiológica (Center for Epidemiological Research) from 1999 seconded Dr Raw: "The studies conducted on the use of the Cuban vaccine in children under 4 years old—the major risk group for hepatitis B—showed no evidence that the vaccine protected them against the disease. This vaccine should not be recommended.”
All current medical literature flatly asserts that despite countless attempts, "no effective vaccine against the Meningitis B has yet been developed." The pharmaceutical giant Novartis is currently testing one and claims to be close to its development.
Sadly for Castro, the medical establishment abounds 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 sympathetic news agencies and 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 (though their spouses and children were held hostage in Cuba) to heal the sick and raise the dead. This was coupled with "free" treatment of poor foreigners from the Carribbean and Latin American nations in Cuban hospitals. The scheme has gotten no end of gushy reviews in the major media.
Some less prominent reviews might add perspective. Especially as these report much closer-range observations of the scheme along with follow-ups. Here's one from the newspaper The Jamaican Gleaner titled, "Eye Surgery Hopes Dashed; Patients Suffer Complications," which notes: "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." "Since I come back, from Cuba," said George Foster, a 70-year-old Jamaican participant in the Cuban "Miracle Operation," "I can see from the right eye but I can't see from the left."
Brazil also got a birds-eye view of Cuba's vaunted "Doctor Diplomacy." "96 Cuban Doctors Expelled from Brazil” starts the April, 2005 story from Agence France-Presse. "Federal judge Marcelo Bernal ruled in favor of a demand by the Brazilian state of Tocantins’ Consejo Regional de Medicina (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, over 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. This exam is considered a cakewalk even by the graduates of Mexico’s Tec de Monterrey School of Medicine. Most Cuba-certified doctors even flunk the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates' exam for certification as "Physician Assistants," making them unfit in the U.S. even as nurses.
None of this is meant to disparage these hapless men and women who were simply cursed by fate to be born under a Stalinist tyranny, nor those who took it upon themselves to overcome that curse and who today enjoy the blessings of liberty while employed in other fields. I'm simply disclosing some facts Michael Moore's Cuban case officers are desperate to hide. Here are a few more:
According to the same report by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the mortality rate of Cuban children aged 1 to 4 is 34 percent higher than the U.S. (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1000). But these don't figure into U.N. and World Health Organization spotlighted "infant-mortality rates." So apparently the pressure (so far) is not on Cuban doctors to fudge these figures.
In April 2001, Dr. Juan Felipe García MD of Jacksonville, Florida, interviewed several recent doctor defectors from Cuba. Based on what he heard, he reported the following: "The official Cuban infant-mortality figure is a farce. Cuban pediatricians constantly falsify figures for the regime. If an infant dies during its first year the doctors often reports he was older. Otherwise such lapses could cost him severe penalties and his job."
Cuba's infant mortality rate, though it plunged from 13th lowest in the world pre-Castro to 40th today -- is also kept artificially low by an abortion rate of 0 .71 per live birth, the Hemisphere's highest by far which "terminates" any pregnancy that even hints at trouble.
More tragic still, the maternal mortality rate in Cuba is almost four times that of the U.S. rate (33 versus 8.4 per 1000). Peculiar how so many mothers die during childbirth in Cuba. And how many 1-4 year olds perish, while from birth to one years old (the period during which they qualify in U.N. statistics as infants) they're perfectly healthy.
At the very least, such statistics should lead people to question Cuba's official infant-mortality figures. They may not make for a flattering portrait of Cuba, but unlike Michael Moore’s documentary, they have the virtue of being true.