I strongly encourage you all to read the whole article, but here are some highlights for your perusal.

On the subject of Moore’s claim that Cubans live longer than Americans:

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 regard to longevity figures. All they’re proving is that theirs is a miserable place to live and from which massive numbers of people flee.

And few nations hemorrhage people like Cuba—almost 20% of its population since the glorious revolution. This 20% represents those who got out with the clothes on their back and against enormous odds.

This, of course, makes complete sense when you examine it. If a Cuban is born in Cuba but dies in the US, the death is never recorded in Cuba but rather in the US. This makes it seem as if fewer people are dying in Cuba, but all it really means is that massive numbers of people are fleeing the oppression of Castro’s regime. No matter how you look at it, this is a lose-lose situation for Moore - the facts are squarely against him.

On the quality and state of Cuban doctors:

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 Caribbean and Latin American nations in Cuban hospitals. The scheme has gotten no end of gushy reviews in the major media…

Brazil also got a birds-eye view of Cuba’s vaunted “Doctor Diplomacy.” The April 2005 story from Agence France-Presse titled “96 Cuban Doctors Expelled from Brazil” reported: “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, more than 75% 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 even as nurses.

So much for those vaunted Cuban doctors we see in Sicko. These are people who do not have the knowledge or skill to pass the exam to become a nurse practitioner, let alone a doctor. Would you want to entrust your health with doctors with reputations such as these? I know the LAST thing I would think of doing is bringing 9/11 rescue workers to a country whose doctors who are routinely expelled from other countries as being too incompetent to practice medicine.

And, finally, on the Cuban infant mortality rate:

In April 2001, Dr. Juan Felipe García, MD, of Jacksonville, Fla., 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 report 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 abortion per live birth—the hemisphere’s highest by far, which “terminates” any pregnancy that even hints at trouble.

More interesting (and tragic) still, the maternal mortality rate in Cuba is almost four times that of the U.S. rate (33 versus 8.4 per 1,000). Peculiar how so many mothers die during childbirth in Cuba, but how many one- to four-year-olds perish, while from birth to one year old (the period during which they qualify in UN statistics as infants) they’re perfectly healthy.

This is just simply tragic now matter how you look at it. Forced abortions, high maternal death rates, artificially skewed infant mortality rates… this is simply an abhorrent system run by an abhorrent man, Fidel Castro. How Michael Moore could stomach praising this man and this regime after the crimes against humanity Castro continues to commit to this day astonishes me. All I can hope is that more people begin to call out and question Mr. Moore on his words and actions in regards to Cuba. In the face of facts such as these… how can Michael Moore support Cuba or Castro in any way???