What is the attraction?
Why do the media and the left identify with and believe in dictators with a childlike naivite? John Stossel answers Michael Moore’s assertion that “All the world health organizations have confirmed that if there’s one thing they do right in Cuba, it’s health care. There’s very little debate about that.”
Cuban-born Dr. Jose Carro, who interviews Cuban doctors who have moved to the United States, says Moore’s movie lies. Dr. Darsi Ferrer, a human-rights advocate in Cuba, told us that Americans should not believe the claims being made. He describes the Cuban people as “crazy with desperation” because of poor-quality care.
George Utset, who writes The Real Cuba Web site, says Moore and his group were ushered to the upper floors of the hospital, to rooms reserved for the privileged. “They don’t go to the hospital for regular Cubans. They go to hospital for the elite. And it’s a very different condition,” Utset says.
For ordinary Cubans, health care is different. A YouTube video, posted by a woman from Venezuela, purports to show the two forms of health care, one for the privileged who pay in dollars and a far inferior one for regular Cubans.
Moore claims Cubans live longer than Americans. It’s true that a U.N. report claims that. But the United Nations didn’t gather any data. “The United Nations simply reports whatever the government in Cuba reports, so we have no objective way to know what the real statistics are,” Carro says.
Exactly. Communist countries are famous for hiding the truth. Twenty years ago, when I reported from the Soviet Union, officials insisted there were no poor people in Russia, but they refused to let me look for myself. Why would we believe the Cuban government’s health statistics?
Cuba claims it has low infant mortality, but doctors tell us that Cuban obstetricians abort a fetus when they think there might be a problem. Dr. Julio Alfonso told us he used to do 70-80 abortions a day. And here’s an even more devious way of distorting infant-mortality data: Some doctors tell us that if a baby dies within a few hours of birth, Cuban doctors don’t count him or her as ever having lived.
After all these years, we fail to understand the fascination and empathy from the media and the left with dictators and their easy lies. We understand that the authentic man of violence is a romantic figure, an alpha male said to possess the greatest measure of power, justice and mercy. That is an attractive children’s tale, and perhaps the media and the left feel some need to invest psychologically in someone who in a fantasy way will right the wrongs of their own childhoods and lives. But all the wishing and identification and sucking up is bizarre in an adult. We have the recurring image: the surprise, horror, and utter disbelief on the faces of the Walter Durantys, Michael Moores, and Oliver Stones of the world when suddenly the great man decided that they were next for the gulag or the executioner’s chamber.