Terry Glavin, of Chronicles & Dissent, zeros in on some of what are by now the usual suspects in ill-considered Left excess, particularly their PT Barnum, Michael Moore, about whom Glavin has written so incisively in the past. Glavin’s focus now is on Moore’s Wikileaks role, including the latter’s usual manipulations of the truth regarding revelations about him and his film Sicko in the secret Wikileaks cables.

Moore himself tries to spin revelations about the Cuban reaction to Sicko as propagandistic Government spin – except, of course, that the cable from American diplomats in Cuba was confidential and not meant for public propagandistic release. So while Moore argues whether the cable actually claims Sicko was banned in Cuba – apparently not – he avoids a greater truth. Of the two additional references in the cable to Sicko, Glavin explains,

One concerns the stark contrast between Moore’s version of Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana and the reality of the decrepit hospital and its corrupt practices. Moore’s film shows the bright and shiny top floors of the hospital, which are in fact reserved for Venezuelan officials and diplomats who pay in hard cash. The hospital is otherwise off-limits to ordinary Cubans unless they can come up with bribes to the hospital administrator.

The other reference to Moore comes by way of a sarcastic suggestion that if he had been legitimately concerned about depicting the reality of the Cuban health care system he would have visited Havana’s Calixto Garcia Hospital, a crumbling 19th-century edifice that caters to ordinary, actually-existing Cubans. A foreign health service provider who visited the institution was “struck by the shabbiness of the facility,” its lack of staff, basic supplies, and how it was “reminiscent of a scene from some of the poorest countries in the world.”

The rest of the cable presents what might be charitably described as a horror show of Dickensian sick wards, exploitation of health care workers, disregard for the sick and injured and a variety of banana-republic practices about which the Cuban government should be abjectly ashamed. Do read it all, but also bear in mind that none of this should come as “news” to you.

If it’s a truly courageous “whistleblower” you want to advise you in the matter of the Cuban police state that Michael Moore and his friends would prefer you not know about, it’s Yoani Sánchez.

Here’s Comrade Yoani on the absolute irrelevance of the Wikileaks phenomenon to the wretched of the earth: “There are so many who don’t keep records, who have an unwritten culture of repression and who have paper incinerators that smolder all day; bosses who only need to raise an eyebrow, crook an index finger, whisper into an ear a death sentence, or a battle on an African plain, or a call to insult and assault a group of women dressed in white. If some of them would emerge in a local Wikileaks, they would get the maximum penalties, be made examples of with the strongest punishments, without worrying about whether to fabricate a charge of ‘rape’ or ‘bovine slaughter.’ They know that ‘seeing is believing’ and therefore take care that there is no material containing surprising revelations, that the real framework of absolute power will never be visible.”

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