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Until the last month or so, I have not appeared on a single national TV show for nearly 2 and 1/2 years. After the attacks I had to endure three years ago, from a media intent on questioning my patriotism because I dared to speak out against the war when none in the media would, I decided I had had enough and would simply concentrate on making my next film. I had no desire to participate in networks that were complicit in the war because of their refusal the challenge the commander in chief.

Yeah, I’d stay away from TV too if I was routinely being shown to be a deceptive propagandist. And that darned conservative media. They never give any time to people who were against the war; or filmed anti-war crowds of dozens as if they were thousands; or spent an unseemly amount of time on Mike’s personal inspiration, Cindy Sheehan. But Wolf Blitzer hasn’t called for Bush’s impeachment, so I guess that makes him part of the Right Wing Propaganda Machine.

THAT’S the only thing we should be talking about. How profit and greed are killing our fellow Americans. How profit and private insurance have to be removed from our health care system.

That would be the profits that motivate the creation of anti-retrovirals, cheap insulin, non-invasive diagnostics (think MRIs) and laprocopes.

Damned profits!

Somebody should send a crew to Canada to find out why they live longer than we do, and why no Canadian has ever gone bankrupt because of medical bills.

Being less obese, getting more exercise, not shooting each other and having fewer car accidents might account for the two year difference. I’m not sure what would account for our 8.10 WHO responsiveness index against Canada’s 6.98. Canada is closer to Uraguary in responsiveness than they are to us.

And all of the media should start saying how much it costs to go to a doctor in these other top industrialized countries: Nothing. Zip. It’s FREE. Don’t patronize Americans by saying, “Well, it’s not free—they pay for it with taxes!” Yes, we know that. Just like we know that we drive down a city street for FREE—even though we paid for that street with our taxes. The street is FREE, the book at the library is FREE, if your house catches on fire, the fire department will come and put it out for FREE, and if someone snatches your purse, the police officer will chase down the culprit and bring your purse back to you—AND HE WON’T CHARGE YOU A DIME FROM THAT PURSE!

These are all free services, collectively socialized and paid for with our tax dollars. To argue that health care—a life and death issue for many—should not be considered in the same league is ludicrous and archaic. And trust me, once you add up what you pay for out-of-pocket in premiums, deductibles, co-pays, overpriced medicines, and treatments that aren’t covered (not to mention all the other things we pay for like college education, day care and other services that many countries provide for at little or no cost), we, as Americans, are paying far more than the Canadians or Brits or French are paying in taxes. We just don’t call these things taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.

I quoted this in full, including Moore’s shouting, because I don’t think I can do justice to it. First, taxes are involuntary, Mike. I didn’t raise my marginal rate this high. And my one-month old has had no voice in the crushing taxes she will be forced to pay to finance Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. If a sheep is eaten by three wolves, is that voluntary because it was outvoted?

Second, you can’t get “a dime from that purse” when the purse is empty in the first place.

Third, the ignorance of basic economics astounds me.  As a rich guy, Moore knows that the rich pay most of our taxes.  There are four ways money gets spent and the least efficient is when you spend one person’s money on another person.

Mike is again buying into the “socialized medicine is efficient” nonsense.  The only way it can be efficient is to ration care and force people to die.  I’m preparing a massive analysis of the WHO report on my own website, which link I’ll to from here.  Suffice it to say, the evidence that a socialized system gives you better “bang for your buck” is, um, zero.

See you all when I’m back on CNN tomorrow—where the discussion will be not be about whose statistics are right, but rather about the guy without insurance who died while I was writing this letter.

And Moorewatch will be waiting.

P.S. Oh… I forgot to tell you about Paris Hilton. Apparently cooped up for too long at home since getting out of jail, she decided to head out for a night on the town. But where does she go? Clubbing? Cruising down the Strip? No! She and her sister decide to go see “Sicko.” Now THAT’S news! So, no more bad words about Paris Hilton!

Well, that does seem about the intellectual calibre of Michael’s audience. Maybe he’s found a muse to replace Cindy Sheehan.

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Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 in the Oriente Province of Cuba. His extraordinarily large family was led by his religious and domineering grandmother and his violent and turbulent grandfather. The couple shared their home with a rotating swarm of their eleven unmarried daughters – many with one or more children – and their three married sons. The family was extremely poor – they had a small farm full of rocks and not much else. The small bohio hut Arenas’ family inhabited was constantly full of people, noise, and a tremendous amount of violence.

Reinaldo Arenas had almost no literary influences as a child. He had barely any schooling; it was his mother who taught him to read and write. To escape his tumultuous home life Arenas spent his days outdoors where he realized he was an artist at heart. He pulled all of his boundless creativity from nature – in the woods around his home he used to sing and make up fantastical stories about witches, elves, and death. And it was at the young age of six – when Reinaldo came upon a group of men bathing in the nearby river – that he realized something else about himself. He was gay.

Cuba’s economy under Batista was deteriorating rapidly. Food was almost non-existent and there was an increasing amount of violence from Castro’s rebel forces. When Arenas was barely a teenager his family was forced to sell their farm and move to the small city of Holquin – a poor, barren and lifeless town. His grandfather opened a small fruit and vegetable stand and Reinaldo began working making boxes in a guava paste factory, thus solidifying the end of his childhood. His only escapes now were occasional movies on the weekends, the joy of which inspired him to begin to write novels and poetry.

After the infamous “Bloody Christmas” of 1957 when Castro’s rebels tangled with Batista’s military the city of Holquin fell into ruin. Most of the province hated Batista and Castro’s rebels were enmeshed in the nearby mountains. By 1958 the situation had become desperate. Holquin had no food, money or electricity and Reinaldo and his family were starving to death. Feeling trapped, at the age of fourteen, Reinaldo Arenas fled Holquin to join Castro’s rebel forces in the nearby city of Velasco. Though he never saw or fought in a single battle, he aided the rebels by doing whatever small jobs he could.

In 1959 Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s Revolutionary Government took over. Immediately Castro began to hunt down all traitors, informers, and former military personal. Most of those found were systematically executed without a trial. Indeed, more people died in this “cleansing” that in the entire revolution:

Why is it that we, the great majority of the people, and even the intellectuals, did realize that this was the beginning of a new dictatorship, even bloodier that the previous one? Perhaps we did realize it, but the enthusiasm of knowing that now one was part of a revolution, that a dictatorship has been overthrown and the time had come for vengeance, outweighed the injustices and the crimes that were being committed. Not only were injustices being inflicted; the executions were being conducted in the name of justice and freedom, and above all, in the name of the people.

As a reward for his service to the Revolution, at sixteen years Reinaldo Arenas was awarded a scholarship to La Pantoja to become an agricultural accountant in order to help Castro “oversee” Cuba’s land. Arenas was encamped with his classmates and was indoctrinated incessantly with Soviet philosophy and the ideas of Marx and Lenin. Ultimately, Reinaldo and his classmates were informed they were not simply students but the “vanguard of the Revolution” and soldiers for Castro. Instead of attending school they were forced into military training and were subject to quite severe indoctrination into communist philosophy. It was then that Reinaldo first learned that homosexuality was condemned by Castro and that “being a faggot in Cuba was one of the worst disasters that could ever happen to anyone.”

Castro quickly began to seize more and more power. His next move was to destroy all Cuban currency and create new money, effectively cutting off Cuba’s economy from the rest of the world. With this one bold move Castro now controlled how much money any one citizen could have at a time and everything became rationed. After the Bay of Pigs in 1961 Castro revealed to the world that Cuba was a communist regime… and Reinaldo Arenas realized that everything he had done and fought for was in vain. In 1961 Arenas was assigned to work as an accountant at a farm that had been seized by Castro, and later transferred to the INRA (Institute for National Agragarian Reform). His pay wasn’t even enough to buy two meals a day.

By 1963 the persecution of homosexuals was rampant, with many being sent to “rehabilitation” camps or jail. Arenas was terrified that his homosexuality would be discovered and that he would meet the same fate as many of his friends – torture and forced slave labor, simply because he was gay. Although he was sexually active at the time, he lived in constant fear he would be discovered and shipped away, never to be seen again.

Yes… this, gentle reader, is the socialist paradise Michael Moore fawns over in Sicko. This is the dictator that we were only “taught” to be afraid of. I ask you, can you look at these atrocities – atrocities only beginning to manifest themselves I might add – and give me one good reason not to fear Castro? More importantly… can you see one good reason why anyone should defend such a tyrant?

However, I digress. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

1963 marked a huge milestone in Reinaldo Arenas’ life. After composing and reciting a short story for a contest at the National Library, the competition committee was so impressed with Arenas’ work that they transferred him from the INRA to the Library. This move temporarily took Reinaldo away from the world of Castro and into the world of books. He began to read constantly, despite the enormous amount of censorship and the near constant destruction of any book seen as “deviant” in any way. It was Reinaldo’s extensive study of the written word in all its forms that shaped his innate gifts and forged him, at last, into a true writer.

In 1965 Reinaldo Arenas’ book “Celestino Before Dawn” won first honorable mention in a UNEAC (The Cuban Writer’s and Artists’ Association) competition. The book was published and sold out quickly, despite the fact that Arenas still had had no formal literary education. In 1966 Arenas submitted his new book, “Hallucinations” to the UNEAC competition and again won first honorable mention. However, no first prize was given – the prize committee was divided on Arenas’ submission due to the book’s political overtones. The first place prize was voided and through this odd struggle Reinaldo Arenas met and became friends with two extraordinary men – Virgilio Pinera and Lezama Lima.

Virgilio Pinera was an exceptionally talented writer who took Reinaldo under his wing. It was Pinera that taught Arenas how to edit by helping him revise “Hallucinations”. Lezama Lima was a literary giant whose work and attitude inspired Arenas to new heights. Pinera and Lima shared two things in common – they were both homosexuals and were being constantly persecuted for it, and they hated Castro and communism with great passion. Both men refused to support Castro and published works denouncing him. These tremendous acts of defiance inspired Arenas to continue writing as well as spurring on his own anti-Castro sentiments.

Pinera, Lima, and others frequently held gatherings where writers could congregate and discuss their work. These gatherings quickly turned deadly as Castro cracked down harder and harder on artists. Most of Reinaldo Arenas’ friends were either killed, committed suicide, or were turned through torture into government puppets due to Castro’s fear of the arts:

A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes that control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.

The almost painful irony here is that if he lived in Castro’s Cuba, Michael Moore would have been (and would be even today) interned at a work camp, imprisoned for his “counter-revolutionary” work, or worse, simply executed for his art. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

By 1966 all homosexual acts were declared illegal and were punishable by jail time. To service these laws Castro opened concentration camps for homosexuals. By this time Reinaldo Arenas was living with his aunt Agata – a hard woman who openly worked for Castro and constantly threatened to turn her own nephew over to the police. Arenas was constantly harassed by State Security and was forced to hide both his work and his sexuality. The list of people Reinaldo could trust was growing smaller every day.

An important event occurred in 1967 - the “Solon de Mayo” art exhibition was moved to Havana in an attempt by Castro to white-wash Cuba’s image. Through this event Reinaldo met Jorge and Margarita Camacho, a couple living in France who began to smuggle Arenas’ work out of Cuba. Because of this extraordinary couple, Arenas’ novel “Hallucinations” was published and won Best Foreign Novel in France. Arenas’ previous novel “Celestino before Dawn” was republished as “Singing from the Well” as well as collections of essays, poetry, and stories. While this cemented his international career it also brought down an enormous amount of government surveillance on him – not just for the content of the books but for daring to publish them without Castro’s consent.

Because of this governmental oppression, Reinaldo decided to write his “pentagonia” – his “secret history of Cuba”. It was to be a series of five novels or “agonies” in which a writer lives, writes, suffers and dies… only to be “reborn” in the next book. “Singing from the Well” became the first book of the series, and “The Palace of the White Skunks” was smuggled out by the Camachos as the second installment. However the third and central piece, “Farewell to the Sea”, was destroyed by a close friend, who was both afraid to hide it as well as frightened by its content. Betrayed by his friend, Arenas had no choice but to begin writing his masterwork a second time. In order to avoid his work being destroyed again, he was forced to hide all his papers in a nook under his aunt’s roof.

In 1969 forced “voluntary” labor began and all the UNEAC writers were systematically sent to work in Cuba’s sugarcane mills. Reinaldo was sent in 1970 to both work in the fields and to write in praise of Castro. The workers were treated like beasts, called slaves, were starved, and any who tried to desert received between 5 to 30 years in jail. And the health care? Unlike the kind and gentle picture Moore paints of Cuban healthcare, this is the *real* care people received in Cuba at the mills:

During the day the barracks became sort of a hospital; the only people allowed to stay there were the sick and the head of the barracks, the one who watched over all the others. The patients were those who had lost an arm or were seriously ill and waiting for a transfer to a clinic or hospital, which sometimes took months, if it came at all.

I wonder why Moore failed to mention things like this in his rosy portrait of Cuban health care? Could it be that it destroys any and all case for the humanity of Castro and his social programs? In any case, Castro failed to meet his goal of ten million tons of sugar, and this failure destroyed the whole of the economy of Cuba, making it the poorest country in the Soviet Union.

In 1971 the dissident writer Herberto Padilla was captured, tortured, and forced to confess his “crimes” of writing and free-thinking. The “Padilla Case” led the formation of the First Congress of Education and Culture, an organization that made laws about everything from fashion to sex. The crackdown against homosexuality became unbearable and all gays who held positions in cultural organizations were immediately fired:

The system of parameterization was imposed; that is, every gay writer, every gay artist, every gay dramatist, received a telegram telling him that his behavior did not fall within the political and moral parameters necessary for his job, and that he was therefore either terminated or offered another job in the forced-labor camps… the island became a maximum-security jail, where everybody, according to Castro, was happy to stay.

Homosexuals were systematically arrested, publicly humiliated, forced to confess and degrade themselves and then sent for “rehabilitation” in the sugarcane mills or similar camps. Many were sent to jail for between 8 and 30 years, and some simply killed themselves from the pressure. Others became informers for Castro in order to save themselves.  On the other hand, Reinaldo Arenas refused to yield. Although he himself had been fired and was now destitute, he never ceased his writing. He continued to smuggle his work out of Cuba and he never stopped denouncing Castro with his words.

Reinaldo was a naïve adolescent peasant when he was taken in by Castro’s promises. Michael Moore is a world-savvy adult. How can he justify his praise of a murderous tyrant who enslaved, tortured, and demoralized his people? How can he excuse his portrayal of Cuba as an island paradise where Castro cares for all equally? Gentle reader, look back at Arenas’ tale thus far and answer me honestly… can there be any reasonable explanation for the praise Michael Moore heaps on Cuba and Castro’s programs?  The answer, of course, is no.

Reinaldo Arenas thought things were nearly intolerable. But then, in the summer of 1973, everything changed, and Reinaldo Arenas’ life turned from a vivid nightmare into a version of hell from which he barely escaped with his life. It all began one beautiful day at the beach….

“Here comes a candle to light you to bed. And here comes a hatchet to chop off your head.” - Children’s rhyme



…to be continued in part three…

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Perhaps you have heard his name. Perhaps you’ve heard him mentioned in passing as one of, if not the greatest writer to ever emerge from Cuba. Perhaps you know his books have been published in dozens of languages all over the world, or that he has won several awards, including Best Foreign Novel in France for his book “Hallucinations”. Perhaps you might have heard of his autobiography, “Before Night Falls”, and that the editors of The New York Times Book Review hailed it as one of the fourteen best books of 1993. Or perhaps you might have seen the movie adaptation of “Before Night Falls”, a gritty and almost hallucinatory film directed by Julian Schnabel which garnered several Oscar nominations, including a Best Actor nod to Javier Bardiem who played Arenas.

Or perhaps you are one of the lucky ones, the ones who have been blessed enough to read the work of Reinaldo Arenas. Perhaps you have felt yourself transported into one of Arenas’ worlds, worlds of such texture and color and majesty that they take your breath away. Perhaps you have read and smelled the tulips growing in the breezeway that Adolfina planted, or the felt the grit of the guava paste Fortunato made. Perhaps you, as I do, look at things like the moon and the sea in a different way now because of the sheer power of Reinaldo Arenas’ words.

I can hear the questions beginning already. Why, Donna? Why, on Moorewatch, are you talking about this Cuban writer? What could Reinaldo Arenas possibly have to do with Michael Moore?

The answer, of course, is abundantly simple. Reinaldo Arenas has a very important story to tell about what life was like for him in Castro’s Cuba, and it is a story we all need to hear. After seeing how Moore depicted Cuban life in Sicko, it has become vital that we know and understand what Cuban life under the nightmarish dictatorship of Fidel Castro is truly like. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is that truth.

After nearly 15 years of hiding, exile, torture, work camps and prisons, Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape from Castro’s regime in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. He spent the next ten years of his life alternately finishing his tremendous body of work and denouncing the hellish Castro dictatorship to anyone who would listen. He wrote essays, letters, and lectured about life under Castro all over the world. In 1988 he wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro demanding that Castro hold a plebiscite similar to the one held in Chile by Pinochet. The letter drew thousands of signatures from around the world, including those of eight Nobel laureates. The letter was internationally published, drawing the wrath of Castro and his supporters.

When Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide in 1990 after a long and terrible battle with AIDS, he issued a suicide note that was published around the world. In that note, he wrote “you are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free.” Seventeen years later, his dream remains unrealized. Cuba is not free and Castro still rules the island with an iron fist. He is aided every day both by those support Castro’s illusion that Cuba is free and unoppressed, but also by those who know and remain silent.

Reinaldo Arenas would not remain silent. For twenty-five years Arenas fought – first to stay alive and then to scream to the world about the horrors that were happening in Cuba under Castro. Death silenced Arenas’ voice but not his spirit. His spirit lives on through his words and his work. His spirit lives on in his friends, his family, his supporters. And his spirit lives on in me, I who have been so moved by his work.

I am not Cuban or of Cuban descent. I have no Cuban relatives nor have I a drop of Cuban blood in my veins. What I am is simply a woman who has been so moved by the words of Reinaldo Arenas that I feel compelled to tell his story to the world, to fight as he did, to show the world the truth, his story and his truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is now silent, but I am not. Over the next few weeks I will tell you the story of Arenas’ life in Castro’s Cuba. It will amaze you, terrify you, bewilder you and move you. I want to you to listen to his story and know that it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is what it was like for Reinaldo Arenas. This is what it was like in living in constant terror under Castro’s iron fist in Cuba. This is what it is still like in Cuba. And until we all stand up and begin telling the truth and denouncing Fidel Castro as the oppressor and murderous dictator that he is, this is how it will always be in Cuba.

This is the story of Reinaldo Arenas….

“I come to speak your name so I may begin this dream again.” - Garden of Caressess

---

“It all comes back to his memory now. Unable to stop himself, he sighs and weeps.” - Song of Roland”


Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 in the Oriente Province of Cuba. His extraordinarily large family was led by his religious and domineering grandmother and his violent and turbulent grandfather. The couple shared their home with a rotating swarm of their eleven unmarried daughters – many with one or more children – and their three married sons. The family was extremely poor – they had a small farm full of rocks and not much else. The small bohio hut Arenas’ family inhabited was constantly full of people, noise, and a tremendous amount of violence.

Reinaldo Arenas had almost no literary influences as a child. He had barely any schooling; it was his mother who taught him to read and write. To escape his tumultuous home life Arenas spent his days outdoors where he realized he was an artist at heart. He pulled all of his boundless creativity from nature – in the woods around his home he used to sing and make up fantastical stories about witches, elves, and death. And it was at the young age of six – when Reinaldo came upon a group of men bathing in the nearby river – that he realized something else about himself. He was gay.

Cuba’s economy under Batista was deteriorating rapidly. Food was almost non-existent and there was an increasing amount of violence from Castro’s rebel forces. When Arenas was barely a teenager his family was forced to sell their farm and move to the small city of Holquin – a poor, barren and lifeless town. His grandfather opened a small fruit and vegetable stand and Reinaldo began working making boxes in a guava paste factory, thus solidifying the end of his childhood. His only escapes now were occasional movies on the weekends, the joy of which inspired him to begin to write novels and poetry.

After the infamous “Bloody Christmas” of 1957 when Castro’s rebels tangled with Batista’s military the city of Holquin fell into ruin. Most of the province hated Batista and Castro’s rebels were enmeshed in the nearby mountains. By 1958 the situation had become desperate. Holquin had no food, money or electricity and Reinaldo and his family were starving to death. Feeling trapped, at the age of fourteen, Reinaldo Arenas fled Holquin to join Castro’s rebel forces in the nearby city of Velasco. Though he never saw or fought in a single battle, he aided the rebels by doing whatever small jobs he could.

In 1959 Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s Revolutionary Government took over. Immediately Castro began to hunt down all traitors, informers, and former military personal. Most of those found were systematically executed without a trial. Indeed, more people died in this “cleansing” that in the entire revolution:

Why is it that we, the great majority of the people, and even the intellectuals, did realize that this was the beginning of a new dictatorship, even bloodier that the previous one? Perhaps we did realize it, but the enthusiasm of knowing that now one was part of a revolution, that a dictatorship has been overthrown and the time had come for vengeance, outweighed the injustices and the crimes that were being committed. Not only were injustices being inflicted; the executions were being conducted in the name of justice and freedom, and above all, in the name of the people.

As a reward for his service to the Revolution, at sixteen years Reinaldo Arenas was awarded a scholarship to La Pantoja to become an agricultural accountant in order to help Castro “oversee” Cuba’s land. Arenas was encamped with his classmates and was indoctrinated incessantly with Soviet philosophy and the ideas of Marx and Lenin. Ultimately, Reinaldo and his classmates were informed they were not simply students but the “vanguard of the Revolution” and soldiers for Castro. Instead of attending school they were forced into military training and were subject to quite severe indoctrination into communist philosophy. It was then that Reinaldo first learned that homosexuality was condemned by Castro and that “being a faggot in Cuba was one of the worst disasters that could ever happen to anyone.”

Castro quickly began to seize more and more power. His next move was to destroy all Cuban currency and create new money, effectively cutting off Cuba’s economy from the rest of the world. With this one bold move Castro now controlled how much money any one citizen could have at a time and everything became rationed. After the Bay of Pigs in 1961 Castro revealed to the world that Cuba was a communist regime… and Reinaldo Arenas realized that everything he had done and fought for was in vain. In 1961 Arenas was assigned to work as an accountant at a farm that had been seized by Castro, and later transferred to the INRA (Institute for National Agragarian Reform). His pay wasn’t even enough to buy two meals a day.

By 1963 the persecution of homosexuals was rampant, with many being sent to “rehabilitation” camps or jail. Arenas was terrified that his homosexuality would be discovered and that he would meet the same fate as many of his friends – torture and forced slave labor, simply because he was gay. Although he was sexually active at the time, he lived in constant fear he would be discovered and shipped away, never to be seen again.

Yes… this, gentle reader, is the socialist paradise Michael Moore fawns over in Sicko. This is the dictator that we were only “taught” to be afraid of. I ask you, can you look at these atrocities – atrocities only beginning to manifest themselves I might add – and give me one good reason not to fear Castro? More importantly… can you see one good reason why anyone should defend such a tyrant?

However, I digress. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

1963 marked a huge milestone in Reinaldo Arenas’ life. After composing and reciting a short story for a contest at the National Library, the competition committee was so impressed with Arenas’ work that they transferred him from the INRA to the Library. This move temporarily took Reinaldo away from the world of Castro and into the world of books. He began to read constantly, despite the enormous amount of censorship and the near constant destruction of any book seen as “deviant” in any way. It was Reinaldo’s extensive study of the written word in all its forms that shaped his innate gifts and forged him, at last, into a true writer.

In 1965 Reinaldo Arenas’ book “Celestino Before Dawn” won first honorable mention in a UNEAC (The Cuban Writer’s and Artists’ Association) competition. The book was published and sold out quickly, despite the fact that Arenas still had had no formal literary education. In 1966 Arenas submitted his new book, “Hallucinations” to the UNEAC competition and again won first honorable mention. However, no first prize was given – the prize committee was divided on Arenas’ submission due to the book’s political overtones. The first place prize was voided and through this odd struggle Reinaldo Arenas met and became friends with two extraordinary men – Virgilio Pinera and Lezama Lima.

Virgilio Pinera was an exceptionally talented writer who took Reinaldo under his wing. It was Pinera that taught Arenas how to edit by helping him revise “Hallucinations”. Lezama Lima was a literary giant whose work and attitude inspired Arenas to new heights. Pinera and Lima shared two things in common – they were both homosexuals and were being constantly persecuted for it, and they hated Castro and communism with great passion. Both men refused to support Castro and published works denouncing him. These tremendous acts of defiance inspired Arenas to continue writing as well as spurring on his own anti-Castro sentiments.

Pinera, Lima, and others frequently held gatherings where writers could congregate and discuss their work. These gatherings quickly turned deadly as Castro cracked down harder and harder on artists. Most of Reinaldo Arenas’ friends were either killed, committed suicide, or were turned through torture into government puppets due to Castro’s fear of the arts:

A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes that control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.

The almost painful irony here is that if he lived in Castro’s Cuba, Michael Moore would have been (and would be even today) interned at a work camp, imprisoned for his “counter-revolutionary” work, or worse, simply executed for his art. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

By 1966 all homosexual acts were declared illegal and were punishable by jail time. To service these laws Castro opened concentration camps for homosexuals. By this time Reinaldo Arenas was living with his aunt Agata – a hard woman who openly worked for Castro and constantly threatened to turn her own nephew over to the police. Arenas was constantly harassed by State Security and was forced to hide both his work and his sexuality. The list of people Reinaldo could trust was growing smaller every day.

An important event occurred in 1967 - the “Solon de Mayo” art exhibition was moved to Havana in an attempt by Castro to white-wash Cuba’s image. Through this event Reinaldo met Jorge and Margarita Camacho, a couple living in France who began to smuggle Arenas’ work out of Cuba. Because of this extraordinary couple, Arenas’ novel “Hallucinations” was published and won Best Foreign Novel in France. Arenas’ previous novel “Celestino before Dawn” was republished as “Singing from the Well” as well as collections of essays, poetry, and stories. While this cemented his international career it also brought down an enormous amount of government surveillance on him – not just for the content of the books but for daring to publish them without Castro’s consent.

Because of this governmental oppression, Reinaldo decided to write his “pentagonia” – his “secret history of Cuba”. It was to be a series of five novels or “agonies” in which a writer lives, writes, suffers and dies… only to be “reborn” in the next book. “Singing from the Well” became the first book of the series, and “The Palace of the White Skunks” was smuggled out by the Camachos as the second installment. However the third and central piece, “Farewell to the Sea”, was destroyed by a close friend, who was both afraid to hide it as well as frightened by its content. Betrayed by his friend, Arenas had no choice but to begin writing his masterwork a second time. In order to avoid his work being destroyed again, he was forced to hide all his papers in a nook under his aunt’s roof.

In 1969 forced “voluntary” labor began and all the UNEAC writers were systematically sent to work in Cuba’s sugarcane mills. Reinaldo was sent in 1970 to both work in the fields and to write in praise of Castro. The workers were treated like beasts, called slaves, were starved, and any who tried to desert received between 5 to 30 years in jail. And the health care? Unlike the kind and gentle picture Moore paints of Cuban healthcare, this is the *real* care people received in Cuba at the mills:

During the day the barracks became sort of a hospital; the only people allowed to stay there were the sick and the head of the barracks, the one who watched over all the others. The patients were those who had lost an arm or were seriously ill and waiting for a transfer to a clinic or hospital, which sometimes took months, if it came at all.

I wonder why Moore failed to mention things like this in his rosy portrait of Cuban health care? Could it be that it destroys any and all case for the humanity of Castro and his social programs? In any case, Castro failed to meet his goal of ten million tons of sugar, and this failure destroyed the whole of the economy of Cuba, making it the poorest country in the Soviet Union.

In 1971 the dissident writer Herberto Padilla was captured, tortured, and forced to confess his “crimes” of writing and free-thinking. The “Padilla Case” led the formation of the First Congress of Education and Culture, an organization that made laws about everything from fashion to sex. The crackdown against homosexuality became unbearable and all gays who held positions in cultural organizations were immediately fired:

The system of parameterization was imposed; that is, every gay writer, every gay artist, every gay dramatist, received a telegram telling him that his behavior did not fall within the political and moral parameters necessary for his job, and that he was therefore either terminated or offered another job in the forced-labor camps… the island became a maximum-security jail, where everybody, according to Castro, was happy to stay.

Homosexuals were systematically arrested, publicly humiliated, forced to confess and degrade themselves and then sent for “rehabilitation” in the sugarcane mills or similar camps. Many were sent to jail for between 8 and 30 years, and some simply killed themselves from the pressure. Others became informers for Castro in order to save themselves.  On the other hand, Reinaldo Arenas refused to yield. Although he himself had been fired and was now destitute, he never ceased his writing. He continued to smuggle his work out of Cuba and he never stopped denouncing Castro with his words.

Reinaldo was a naïve adolescent peasant when he was taken in by Castro’s promises. Michael Moore is a world-savvy adult. How can he justify his praise of a murderous tyrant who enslaved, tortured, and demoralized his people? How can he excuse his portrayal of Cuba as an island paradise where Castro cares for all equally? Gentle reader, look back at Arenas’ tale thus far and answer me honestly… can there be any reasonable explanation for the praise Michael Moore heaps on Cuba and Castro’s programs?  The answer, of course, is no.

Reinaldo Arenas thought things were nearly intolerable. But then, in the summer of 1973, everything changed, and Reinaldo Arenas’ life turned from a vivid nightmare into a version of hell from which he barely escaped with his life. It all began one beautiful day at the beach….

“Here comes a candle to light you to bed. And here comes a hatchet to chop off your head.” - Children’s rhyme

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“Come, demon.” - Arthur Rimbaud


The sun was hot and the water was warm in the summer of 1973. Reinaldo Arenas and his friend Pepe Malas were enjoying a swim at Guanabo Beach when they discovered that they had been robbed off all their belongings, including their clothes and bags. Against Reinaldo’s protestations, Malas called over a nearby police officer and reported the theft. The young thieves were quickly apprehended by the police and both Arenas and Malas were requested to appear at the Havana police department the following day.

Reinaldo Arenas was filled with apprehension; he feared a police trap. Unfortunately for him, his premonition was correct. The young thieves accused Arenas and Malas of being homosexuals who had tried to fondle their genitals. Because under Castro’s law “in the case of a homosexual committing a sexual crime, anyone’s accusation was enough to prosecute”, both Reinaldo Arenas and Pepe Malas were immediately arresting for the corruption of minors and brought to the Guanabo jail.

After Reinaldo Arenas was released on bail he met with his appointed lawyer… and realized the situation was far more dire than he could have ever guessed. His terrified attorney showed him an overflowing file filled with information about Arenas’ illegal overseas publications and statements against him from some of his closest friends. Because Arenas had published overseas without Castro’s permission he was seen as a counter-revolutionary and a threat to Castro’s regime. Between these publications and the sworn statements by his friends against him, Reinaldo Arenas was now facing charges for political crimes and was looking at eight years or more in jail. 

Arenas was arrested again the next day and was taken to the Patu Miramar police jail. Shortly after his arrival at the jail, there was a brief commotion and his cell door was left unlocked. In an incredibly daring move, Reinaldo slipped the lock off the door, quietly left the station and dove into the water nearby. It was an amazing escape, and Arenas was able to swim to a distant beach where he wouldn’t be quickly apprehended.

His situation now turning more desperate by the minute, Reinaldo Arenas decided to risk an escape to Guantanamo Bay in the hopes he could reach US soil. He shaved off his long hair, donned a set of threadbare clothes and took a three day long train ride to Guantanamo. Under the cover of night, Reinaldo Arenas set out for the first river crossing that would take him to safety. However, when he reached the river he heard strange crackling noises in the water. Suddenly, bright green lights appeared around him and machine gun fire rang out in the night. The lights were infrared sensors – the Cuban border patrol had sensed an intruder and began hunting him. Terrified, Reinaldo scaled a tall tree and hid there for two days and nights until the search was over.

When Arenas finally descended from his hiding place in the tree he tried again to cross the river. It was only after he began his swim across the dark river that he discovered the source of those odd crackling sounds. The river was filled with alligators – the cracking sound was the gnashing of their teeth. With so many predators in the water there was simply no way to cross. Defeated, Reinaldo Arenas was forced to return to Guantanamo.

After wandering through Guantanamo for three days with no food or money, Reinaldo Arenas joined up with a group of draft dodgers who were planning on jumping trains to get to Havana. Upon his return to Havana Arenas hoped he would be able to find refuge with some of his friends and try to escape Cuba through the French Embassy.

Reinaldo managed to get his friends Juan and Jose Abreu to deliver a letter to the French Ambassador begging for asylum. The Ambassador refused to help, but Reinaldo’s loyal friends the Camachos sent Juan Lagaurde to try and smuggle Arenas out of Cuba. The plan failed as well, and a desperate Arenas began to write letters to the Red Cross, The UN, UNESCO and foreign dignitaries. Laguarde was able to smuggle these letters out of Cuba and they were published in newspapers around the world:

I wanted to report all the persecution I was being subjected to, and began as follows: “For a long time I have been the victim of a sinister persecution by the Cuban Regime.” I went on to list the censorship and the harsh treatment that we Cuban writers had suffered and to name all the writers who had been executed… In one paragraph I explained the situation I was in and how, as persecution was escalating, I was wiring those lines in hiding, while waiting for the most sinister and criminal state apparatus to put an end to my existence. And I stated: I want now to affirm that want I am saying here is the truth, even though under torture I might later be forced to say the opposite.

Yes, this is the Cuban regime Michael Moore praises. How wonderfully Castro treats his people! How kind and benevolent he is! Look at how well he treats his gifted writers and artists! Michael Moore, how can you read these desperate words and still find the gall to praise Castro’s regime that hunted this man simply for being a writer?!?

But I digress once again. Back to Reinaldo Arenas….

After the publication of his letters, Reinaldo Arenas found himself in a desperate situation. The majority of his friends either exiled or informed on him and one burned the whole of Arenas’ written work that he had been hiding. A total of twelve books were lost forever. The Abreu brothers remained allies and told Reinaldo that Castro had put out an order to have Reinaldo Arenas captured immediately due to the international scandal his letter had caused.

There was nowhere to hide anymore. After ten days without any real food or water, Reinaldo Arenas emerged from the ditch where he had been sleeping to try to buy a bite of ice cream. He was immediately apprehended by the police and was transferred immediately to the infamous and deadly El Morro Prison.

Morro Castle had been a medieval colonial fortress at Havana Port that had been converted into a hellish jail. The cells were huge wards where up to 50 prisoners were jammed into one cell. The toilet was a hole in the ground and with no toilet paper and everything and everyone was covered in feces. The smell and the noise were overwhelming. The treatment of homosexuals was abhorrent. They were held in underground wards that filled with water at high tides, starved, and treated like beasts.

Perhaps the most shocking fact about El Morro was that everyone from mere traffic offenders to mass murderers were stuffed together in the cells. Some of the crimes for which people had been imprisoned seemed simply insane:

There was, for example, an unfortunate father with all his sons, who had been sentenced to five years because they had killed one of their cows to feed the family, something Castro’s laws did not allow… Many inmates in my ward said there they were in jail because they had committed ‘penicide’. This was the name they had given to the rape of women and minors. But penicide included almost anything. For example, one of my fellow prisoners was there because some old ladies had seen him taking a shower, in the nude, in his own backyard and denounced him.

Terrified of torture and the prison conditions, Reinaldo Arenas took an overdose of pills in a desperate suicide attempt. He woke up three days later in the prison hospital – it was in fact a miracle he survived. Back in Ward 7, Reinaldo learned to survive the worst of El Morro by writing letters for prisoners and giving French lessons. He also quickly learned to hide and ration his meager food to avoid starvation when the guards neglected to feed the prisoners.

Indeed, the guards at El Morro were sadistic. They routinely gang-raped the young prisoners and those who fought back were mutilated. The guards regularly beat the prisoners for no reason and without any mercy. Needless to say, many of the inmates were driven crazy by the routine torture and conditions. They manufactured weapons from sticks, nails and razors to defend themselves from the guards and other prisoners. Suicides were all too common. The prisoners were allowed access to the roof about once a month, and many used that opportunity to throw themselves over the edge, dashing their bodies on the rocks. Others hung themselves, and still others would kill other prisoners simply so they would be executed for it.

The horrors and atrocities that occurred within the walls of El Morro cannot be conveyed with words. Indeed, I find myself now at a loss to continue to describe the beatings, torture, mutilation, isolation, degradation, and murder of all those poor souls. Reading these stories and thinking about these horror fills me with a rage and sadness I can barely contain.

But what I need to understand is how Michael Moore could know of such atrocities and *STILL* lavish praise upon Castro and his regime! Mr. Moore… how could you possibly condone such atrocities against humanity? Reinaldo Arenas was an artist, a writer. He was thrown into a hellish prison and subjected to incredible violence SIMPLY FOR BEING AN ARTIST.

Mr. Moore… do you not realize that if you were Cuban your work and actions would have you in the same place as Reinaldo Arenas? You take pride – as well you should – for being able to create art that makes political statements. Reinaldo Arenas and countless other artists, writers, and dramatists were thrown in jail, tortured, forced to recant their work and then executed for doing exactly that. Do you not see that if you were Cuban you would have suffered the same fate as these poor Cuban artists? You say you are a defender of humanity and that you want all humans treated with dignity and care. Why are you not denouncing these horrors? How could you possibly defend a system where you yourself would ultimately meet your death for the type of work you create? Do you not understand that if you were Cuban and made a version of Fahrenheit 9/11 about Castro you would have been executed? Knowing this… how can you possibly defend Castro in any way?

I have let my anger impede this story again. Back to Reinaldo Arenas….

It had been six months and Reinaldo Arenas had still not been brought to trial. One day he was abruptly taken to a “penalty cell” – a tiny box less than a meter high with a dirt floor and a hole for a toilet. He was held there for days without food or water before being brought before Lieutenant Victor, the man in charge of Arenas’ case.

Arenas’ often brutal interrogations began. He was grilled all day about how he got his work out of Cuba and sent back to the penalty cell at night. After a week of the interrogation and torture Reinaldo became afraid he might break and give up the names of his friends. Rather than risk that happening Reinaldo Arenas attempted to hang himself. He was saved and transferred to the State Security Headquarters as Villa Marista – Castro didn’t want Arenas dead before he confessed.

At Villa Marista Reinaldo was thrown into a small box of a cell with constant light and a hole in the ground for a toilet. He was starved for days before the interrogations began again. Lieutenants Victor and Gamboa told Arenas they could make him simply disappear. They were right and Reinaldo knew it – there was no way out anymore.

Reinaldo Arenas was questioned and tortured all day and night. He was often left without food or water and was subjected to steam burnings, what he called “torture similar to fire”. Neither Lieutenant would believe anything Arenas told them.

Finally, after weeks of endless torture and imprisonment, Reinaldo Arenas broke and confessed:

My confession was a long one; I talked about my life and my homosexuality, which I detested, about having ideological weaknesses and my accursed books, the likes of which I would never write again. I actually recanted all I had done in my life, my only hope for redemption being the possibility that in the future I could join and become part of the Revolution and work day and night on its behalf. Needless to say, I was requesting rehabilitation, that is, to be sent to a labor camp; and I committed myself to work for the government and write optimistic novels.

Once again I feel myself brimming with anger. Mr. Moore… read these words. Reinaldo Arenas, one of the greatest writers to ever emerge from Cuba, was tortured endlessly and forced to recant his life’s work because Castro demanded it. You have whined incessantly to the press about how the Bush administration has tried to oppress you and suppress your work. Tell me, Mr. Moore… how does it feel to read the words of an artist who was *truly* oppressed? Do you not feel shame in touting the wonders of Castro after reading about how Castro destroyed generations of great artists who, just like you, simply wanted to create art and speak openly about their government?

Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

Reinaldo Arenas’ confession appeased the Lieutenants. After four months in isolation Arenas was transferred back to El Morro to await his trial for the corruption of minors. The political charges were not taken to trial due to his confession. In a shocking turn of events, both men who Reinaldo was accused of “fondling” them recanted their testimony at trial, and Arenas was only sentenced to two years for “lascivious abuses”.

Shortly after the trial Lieutenant Victor paid Arenas a visit at El Morro. Reinaldo Arenas’ novel “The Palace of the White Skunks” – the second installment in his “pentagonia” – had just been published in France. Now the world knew Reinaldo still lived and Castro could not simply execute him. However, as punishment, he was transferred to Ward 1 – an underground dungeon filled with sewage and filth. The others in the ward were transferred out and Reinaldo Arenas – one of the greatest writers in Cuba – was left in squalor and in despair over his confession:

Before my confession I had a great companion, my pride. After the confession I had nothing; I had lost my dignity and my rebellious spirit… Now I was alone in my misery; no one could witness my misfortune in that cell. The worst misfortune was to continue living after all that, after having betrayed myself and after having been betrayed by almost everyone else.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally transferred to an “open prison” in Flores. It was an improvement over the hell of El Morro as you could at least be outdoors. The prisoners in Flores were forced to build houses and later schools from dawn until late at night. This intense forced labor had destroyed the body and health of most of the prisoners there, whose bodies were literally falling apart. Reinaldo himself could not obtain a simple dose of antibiotics to cure an infection because of the lack of medicine in Cuba.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally released in 1976 and briefly stayed with Norberto Fuentes, a State informant. Fuentes kept Arenas under constant watch and tested him repeatedly to see if he would break the promises he made in his confession. However, Arenas did manage to secretly make his way to his old house to attempt to retrieve his second version of “Farewell to the Sea”… only to find out it had been discovered by State Security and taken. Reinaldo would have to rewrite this critical third installment of the “pentagonia” for a third time.

After moving around a great deal, Reinaldo Arenas finally settled in a house with an odd woman named Elia de Calvo. She owned a typewriter – something Reinaldo had lost and desperately needed to work – and she agreed to allow Arenas to stay with her provided he fed her dozens of cats and write her memoirs. Reinaldo agreed, and while he typed Elia’s memoirs he secretly began rewriting “Farewell to the Sea” yet again.

Soon after settling in with Elia, Reinaldo learned his grandmother, who he loved deeply, had died. This news depressed him deeply, but a visit with his old mentor Lezama Lima raised his spirits. Virgilio Pinera also visited with Lima and Arenas that night and the three talked about literature for hours. Upon Reinaldo’s leaving, Lima took Arenas aside and told him that, no matter what happened to him or anyone else… keep writing!

Only a short time after this inspirational visit, Reinaldo Arenas was given a newspaper that simply read “Lezama Lima was buried today”. His friend and mentor had died and the public hadn’t even been informed of his death until after Lima’s funeral and burial. The death of both Lezama and his grandmother sent Reinaldo into a deep depression that lasted for months.

Reinaldo, hoping to find a new home, met Ruben Diaz who offered to sell Arenas a room at the Monserrate Hotel. The place was a dump; it was run down, had no toilets, water or electricity and was full of roaches. After coercing some money from his aunt Reinaldo bought the room and moved in. This was a dangerous move as Castro had forbidden the sale of property in Cuba, but Reinaldo simply wanted to be as free as he could be.

Arenas hadn’t been living at the Monserrate for long before receiving a visit from a couple from France sent by the Camachos to check on Arenas’ well-being. Needless to say, the couple was horrified to see the state in which Reinaldo was living, but the visit was a blessing. Arenas had finished rewriting “Farewell to the Sea” and the couple was able to smuggle it out of Cuba to France.

And then, something extraordinary happened to Reinaldo Arenas. He fell in love with a man named Lazaro Carilles. Lazaro had a terrible home life and had severe psychiatric problems for which he had been previously committed. Regardless, Reinaldo took him in to his home and Lazaro became Reinaldo’s friend and companion for the rest of his life.

In late 1978 Reinaldo Arenas made friends with an eccentric ex-prisoner named Samuel Toca. In a bold move in 1979 Castro decided to let some former political prisoners out of Cuba and Samuel Toca was one of them. Arenas gave Toca a secret message to deliver to the Camachos in France to try at all costs to get Reinaldo out of Cuba. Instead, upon his release Toca began to tell the foreign press all of Arenas’ secrets. A headline in a Spanish paper read “Reinaldo Arenas threatens suicide if not helped out of Cuba”. This scandal prompted a visit from Lieutenant Victor, who denounced Arenas as a counter-revolutionary and threatened him with arrest. Reinaldo Arenas was betrayed again.

In a horrible stroke of fate, Virgilio Pinera died shortly after this incident. Reinaldo was informed he wouldn’t be allowed to attend the funeral of his closest friend. Despite the warnings, he went anyway. At the funeral Arenas voiced the suspicions of many that Pinera’s death was suspicious, and these public pronouncements only tightened the security around him. Reinaldo Arena was facing imminent arrest simply for speaking his mind… and then his life changed forever.

In April of 1980 a bus full of passengers drove threw the gates of the Peruvian embassy begging for asylum. Castro of course demanded their immediate return but the embassy denied him. In an attempt to force the Peruvian’s hand, Castro withdrew his troops guarding the embassy. It did not have the effect Castro desired. Tens of thousands of Cubans flooded the embassy, all begging for help and asylum. This marked the first real uprising of the Cuban people against Castro.

A power struggle ensued between Castro and the Peruvians. Castro cut off the embassy’s food, water and electricity, but the Cuban people would not leave. There were 10,800 people locked inside the building and another 100,000 outside. The world press began to cover this incident in earnest, and Castro had many of the supplicants murdered or gunned down in the street.

Finally, after consultations with the Soviet Union, Castro decided to let some of his people go. He opened the port at Mariel and gave a speech vehemently denouncing those who wanted to leave:

I’ll never forget that speech – Castro looked like a cornered, furious rat – nor will I forget the hypocritical applause… The port of Mariel was then opened, and Castro, after stressing all those people were anti-social, said that precisely what he wanted was to have that riffraff out of Cuba. Posters immediately started to appear with the slogans LET THEM GO, LET THE RIFFRAFF GO.

Almost immediately thousands of boats began to leave Cuba for the United States, but the boats were mostly filled with common criminals, the insane, or spies. Because of his mental instability Lazaro got out quickly. Reinaldo applied for an exit permit at a local police station, hoping that the locals would not have his file from State Security. Reinaldo declared he was a homosexual and was granted an exit permit. He received a passport and, knowing his name would be on a list of those not to be let off the island, on his passport he changed the “e” in his last name to an “i”.

The ruse worked, and on May 4th, 1980, Reinaldo Arenas escaped Cuba on a ship called the “San Lazaro”. The ship’s captain got lost, and what should been a six hour voyage turned into a six day nightmare at sea. Nevertheless, on May 10th, the “San Lazaro” landed in Key West… and Reinaldo Arenas was at last free.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally free of Castro and was anxious to tell the world about the horrors of Cuban life. What Reinaldo Arenas never expected was that the world would not be ready to listen….

“Who would affirm that the light and the shadow do not speak? Only those who do not understand the language of the day and the night.” - Moursa-Ag-Amastan

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“For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” - Acts, 4:20


On May 10th, 1980, Reinaldo Arenas stepped of the deck of the “San Lazaro” and onto the shores of Key West. It was the first time in his life he had ever walked on land not owned and governed by a ruthless dictator.  He had virtually no possessions and no money, so it was a lucky turn of fate when Reinaldo met up with the son of a friend from Cuba. The young man took Arenas to a warehouse filled with donations designed to help the Mariel arrivals. Reinaldo received a batch of new clothes, food, and soap. He then met up with Juan Abreu and his dearest friend Lazaro Carilles and was able to contact the Camachos to ensure that his papers were safe. Finally, after so many years of running, hiding and exile, Reinaldo Arenas began to feel human again.

Reinaldo Arenas’ fame and talent had indeed preceded him, and he was invited to speak at a conference at the International University of Florida. Ironically, Herberto Padilla spoke before him; a drunk and stumbling shadow of his former self. Padilla had never been able to recover from the torture and imprisonment which Castro had imposed on him. The sight of this still-broken man fueled Arenas desire to let the world know about the atrocities being committed against artists and homosexuals in Cuba. But when Reinaldo took the stage and began denouncing Castro and his actions in Cuba, the public turned against him and an astonished Arenas was heckled off the stage.

This alarming trend continued as Reinaldo Arenas continued to speak out publicly against Castro’s regime. Arenas’ Mexican publisher told Reinaldo he should have stayed in Cuba and refused to pay him any of his royalties. A similar event happened in Uruguay where Arenas’ publisher not only denounced Reinaldo but published a letter stating that Arenas should be ostracized from the literary world. Despite the fact that Reinaldo Arenas’ works were published and read in dozens of languages all over the globe, he received almost no monetary compensation for it. Even though these events were a rude awakening to the capitalist system, Reinaldo still found it infinitely superior to communism:

None of this surprised me: I already knew that the capitalist system was also sordid and money hungry. In one of my first statements after leaving Cuba I had declared that “the difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

In the summer of 1980 Professor Reinaldo Sanchez offered Arenas a job as a visiting professor at the International University of Florida teaching Cuban poetry. Reinaldo happily accepted this offer while still communing with the plethora of Cuban writers now exiled in Miami. Most of these formerly great writers were living hand-to-mouth or on welfare. Almost none of them could get published. Arenas tried to use his influence to start a publishing house for these talented writers but could not get funding for the project. He was told “literature is not lucrative” – it seemed no one was ready to hear about life under Fidel Castro.

It was after all of this that Reinaldo Arenas realized life in Miami was simply not for him. He found Miami to be a sad caricature of Cuba, a plastic world with no real substance. So when Arenas received an invitation to speak at Columbia University in New York he left almost immediately. Reinaldo fell in love with New York City and its endless sidewalks, trains, theater and nightlife. A friend found him an apartment within blocks of Times Square and, after finishing his course at the University of Florida, Reinaldo Arenas and Lazaro Carilles moved to New York on New Years Eve of 1980.

1981 and 1982 were wonderful years for Reinaldo Arenas in New York. He began writing prolifically and joined a small group of other exiled Cuban writers who had moved to the big city. Just as they used to do in Cuba, the group met and shared their work with each other, eventually leading to the creation of a magazine called “Mariel”. “Mariel” was a defiant publication that spoke about great writers and unmasked the hypocrisy about Cuba, in particular the treatment of homosexuals by Castro. The magazine wasn’t well received and eventually folded, but Arenas felt it was a triumphant effort for it raised important issues about life in Cuba.

Reinaldo Arenas continued insistence on speaking about the horrors occurring in Cuba under Castro began to cost him both professionally and financially. His books were dropped from assigned reading lists at New York University as well numerous other colleges worldwide. This attitude wasn’t limited to Arenas’ work – it affected all Cuban exiled writers:

In exile we have no country to represent us; we live as if by special permission, always in danger of being rejected. Instead of having a country, we have an anti-country…

In the US these types of problems were particularly bad. Reinaldo Arenas found that the vast majority of US liberals were either supportive of Castro or simply overlooked the atrocities being committed in Cuba. Instead of discovering movements to overthrow Castro, Arenas instead found liberal groups wanting to negotiate with the communist dictator and demanding that dissidents remain quiet. To Reinaldo Arenas, who had spent his life fighting, hiding, and being tortured and imprisoned by Castro, this attitude of tolerance and silence was simply unacceptable:

I remember that after I arrived in the United States, a Cuban exile who lived in Washington said to me: “Don’t ever quarrel with the left.” For people like him, to attack Castro’s government was to fight against the left. But after twenty years of repression, how could I keep silent about these crimes? On the other hand, I have never considered myself as belonging to the “left” or to the “right”, nor do I want to be included under any opportunistic or political label. I tell my truth, as does the Jew who has suffered racism or the Russian was has been in the Gulag, or any human being who has eyes to see the way things really are. I scream, therefore I exist.

It took until 1983 for Reinaldo Arenas to obtain a UN document that classified him a refugee. This document allowed him to travel outside the United States and to finally see his good friends Jorge and Margarita Camacho for the first time since 1967. Arenas then embarked on a speaking tour of Europe beginning in Sweden. At the University of Stockholm he gave a lecture in which he simply read sections of the Granma – Castro’s official newspaper – in order to demonstrate what was really happening daily in Cuba. The audience’s response was pointed – they heckled Reinaldo continuously until he was forced to leave the stage. Indeed, Arenas met responses like this in many places along his tour, proving once again that people were either unwilling or unable to deal with the truth about Castro and Cuba.

Between 1980 and 1983 Reinaldo Arenas also appeared in three films: “In His Own Words”, “The Other Cuba”, and “Improper Conduct”. Arenas loved “Improper Conduct” as it was the first film to openly denounce Castro and the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba. The film contained footage of the UMAP concentration camps for gays and interviews with many survivors. The film attracted international attention and won the Human Rights Award in Europe.

During this time period Reinaldo Arenas accomplished a great deal. He wrote or re-wrote six books, was invited to speak at over 40 universities and gave lectures around the world. He was even able to get his mother out of Cuba to New York for a three month visit, sending her home with a huge sack of clothes for his still poor family. These years were among the happiest in Reinaldo Arenas’ life.

For the next few years Reinaldo Arenas devoted his time to fixing and translating his life’s work. He penned a book of essays on Cuban life called “A Need for Freedom” and a book of poetry called “The Will to Live Manifesting Itself”. He had not yet completed the last two novels of his “pentagonia” when Reinaldo became sick with repeated fevers.

In 1987 Reinaldo Arenas was diagnosed with AIDS. Feeling sure his death was now imminent, Arenas bought a plane ticket to Miami – he wanted to die near his beloved sea. Lazaro brought Reinaldo back to New York and checked him into a hospital despite his lack of money or insurance. Given only a 10% chance to live, Reinaldo fought for nearly four months and beat the odds. Upon his discharge from the hospital, although still quite ill, Reinaldo Arenas swore that he would not die until he had completed his life’s work. 

Now too weak to type, Reinaldo began dictating his autobiography “Before Night Falls”. In the spring of 1988 Arenas’ novel “The Doorman” was published in France to great critical and commercial success and was one of three finalists for the International Medici Prize. This tremendous success was eclipsed when Reinaldo fell ill again with PCP pneumonia. Despite also developing Kaposi’s sarcoma, phlebitis and toxoplasmosis, he once again beat the odds and lived to continue his work.

Reinaldo Arenas finished “Before Night Falls” in the hospital and began to write “The Color of Summer”, the critical fourth installment in his “pentagonia”. Simultaneously he was revising “The Assault”, the fifth and final piece of the “pentagonia” which had been hurried penned in Cuba. Friends helped to translate Arenas’ longhand and “The Assault” was finally completed. He was also eventually able to complete “The Color of Summer” – thus completing the “pentagonia” – and his poetic trilogy “Leper Colony”. Reinaldo Arenas had finally completed his body of work

In 1988 Reinaldo Arenas flew out to Spain to visit with the Camachos. It was there that Jorge Camacho and Arenas hatched an idea to publish an open letter to Castro requesting he hold a plebiscite similar to the one held in Chile by Pinochet. The idea blossomed, and the letter garnered thousands of signatures, including those of eight Nobel Laureates. The letter was published in newspapers around the world, enraging Castro to no end. Reinaldo hoped that Castro’s reaction to this letter would open the eyes of the world to the atrocities being committed in Cuba and that Cuba would someday soon be free.

In 1990, his body ravaged by disease, Reinaldo Arenas gave several sealed envelopes to his translator and friend Dolores M. Koch with instructions to deliver them at the appropriate time. Shortly after this, Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide, and his letter appeared in newspapers around the world:

Dear friends:

Due to my delicate date of health and to the terrible emotional depression it causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life. During the past few years, even though I felt very ill, I have been able to finish my literary work, to which I have devoted almost thirty years. You are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free. I am satisfied to have contributed, though in a very small way, to the triumph of this freedom. I end my life voluntarily because I cannot continue working. Persons near to me are in no way responsible for my decision. There is only one person I hold accountable: Fidel Castro. The sufferings of exile, the pain of being banished from my country, the loneliness, and the diseases contracted in exiles would probably never have happened if I had been able to enjoy freedom in my country.

I want to encourage the Cuban people out of the country as well as on the Island to continue fighting for freedom. I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope.

Cuba will be free. I already am.

--Reinaldo Arenas

It has been seventeen years since the death of Reinaldo Arenas. It has been seventeen years since he thought Cuba might soon be free. And it has been seventeen more years of persecution, oppression, imprisonment, disease and death for the Cuban people under the ruthless rein of Castro.

Now you have heard the story of Reinaldo Arenas, and what you have heard is indeed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Reinaldo’s story is completely verified and vetted. Many of the people who knew him and saw the struggles he endured in Cuba escaped the island as well and have verified his accounts. He has many friends outside of Cuba who are still alive who also corroborate everything he says in his autobiography as fact. Indeed, Lazaro Carilles, Reinaldo’s dearest friend and love, was one of the screenwriters for the movie adaptation for “Before Night Falls”. Reinaldo Arenas’ life is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about life in Cuba and what Castro has done to the Cuban people.

So then, if Reinaldo Arenas is the truth – and a very moving and heart-wrenching truth at that – what then do we make of Michael Moore’s vision of Cuba in Sicko? According to Michael Moore, Cuba is a happy, sunny place where the people are blissful and everyone receives wonderful care by Castro, who isn’t a man deserving of the hate that America flings at him. How can we juxtapose these two diametrically opposing images?

The simple truth is we can’t and we shouldn’t. Reinaldo Arenas showed us the truth about Cuba. All Michael Moore showed us was a film segment full of lies and political propaganda.

By portraying Cuba as he did in Sicko, Michael Moore refused to acknowledge the life, struggle and death of Reinaldo Arenas and the true horror of life in Cuba. In order to advance his own political agenda Moore shows you the beautiful Cuban countryside, footage of well dressed people, cared for houses and, of course, the wonderful hospital system.

What Michael Moore does NOT show you is the Cuba in which real Cuba citizens are forced to live. These pictures from therealcuba.com show in a dramatic fashion the difference between the Cuba the world is allowed to view and the Cuba that really exists. These pictures, these stories, and the life of Reinaldo Arenas show you the real Cuba, not Michael Moore, who knowingly and willingly turns his back on the real Cuba. Michael Moore shows a complete lack of regard for the struggles of the Cuban people under Castro simply to further his personal agenda against the United States, and that, no matter how you look at it, is wrong.

But what Michael Moore has done is so much worse than a simple and willful denial of reality. By portraying Cuba as he did in Sicko, Michael Moore undoes and undermines all the years of hard and painful work Cubans have spent trying to tell the world about the atrocities that have been committed in Cuba. Reinaldo Arenas spent much of the last ten years of his life, many of them when he was extraordinarily ill, trying to educate the world about the tyranny of Castro. And yet because Michael Moore’s influence is so broad he has the ability to undo and undermine all the progress Reinaldo Arenas and so many countless others have made in trying to educate the world about the real Cuba and the horrors of Castro.

Michael Moore is supposed to be a journalist, a documentarian. His work is supposed to be the truth, but it isn’t. It is full of deception and outright lies about what life in Cuba is like and the reasons America “hates” Cuba. But yet the work of this “journalist” is at complete odds with the truth we know about Cuba, particularly Cuban hospitals. In point of fact, Michael Moore’s so-called “truth” is in direct contradiction to the truth of Reinaldo Arenas and the hundreds of thousands of people who have escaped and continue to escape from Cuba every year.

Reinaldo Arenas had met men like Michael Moore when he arrived in the United States. He called them the “Communist Deluxe” – men and women who tolerated or even admired Castro while eating plates full of food and living free lives, refusing to acknowledge or understand that Cuban people couldn’t live like as they did:

I now discovered a variety of creature unknown in Cuba: the Communist Deluxe. I remember that at a Harvard University banquet a German professor said to me “In a way I can understand that you may have suffered in Cuba, but I am a great admirer of Fidel Castro and I am very happy with what he has done in Cuba.” While saying this the man had a huge, full plate of food in front of him, and I told him: “I think it’s fine for you to admire Fidel Castro, but in that case, you should not continue eating that food on your plate; no one in Cuba can eat food like that, with the exception of Cuban officials.” I took his plate and threw it against the wall.

If ever a man fit the description of “Communist Deluxe”, it would be Michael Moore. But, in fact, Michael Moore is so much worse than just this. He isn’t a man who simply denies or lies about the horrors of real Cuban life under Castro. In order to have filmed what he did in Cuba Michael Moore *MUST* have collaborated directly with Castro and his government. Michael Moore worked directly and willingly with the man – or at the very least, agents of the government - who destroyed the life of Reinaldo Arenas and all Cuban citizens. Michael Moore is a collaborator, pure and simple.

The evidence is undeniable. Entrance into Cuba is next to impossible without official permission. It is illegal for foreigners to film inside Cuba without official permission. One cannot even gain access to Havana Hospital – the hospital Moore displays grandly as an everyday example of Cuban health care – without official permission and, yes, without paying a very capitalist bill for your care.

Look at how wonderfully the government firefighters lined up for Moore’s group in Sicko! Look at how happy the men playing dominos in the street seem to be while extolling the virtues of Castro’s health care system! Never mind the man in black shadowing the filming from across the street – I’m sure he’s not with the government. And never mind the fact that, as a state run system, the firefighters would have had to do and say anything the government told them to do or say else face the same type of consequences Reinaldo Arenas faced.

All of this evidence, *all* of it, means that Michael Moore had to have worked directly with Castro’s government to shoot the Cuban portion of Sicko. He worked side by side with the same man who destroyed the life of Reinaldo Arenas. He worked hand in hand with the same man who has destroyed the lives of the Cuban people for 45 years. And he did it all knowing he wasn’t showing the real truth, knowing all he was going to show the world was a piece of Castro-loving propaganda that turns its back on everything for which the Cuban people have fought.

Michael Moore is a Castro collaborator. He has actively and knowing collaborated with a sociopath, communist, mass-murdering dictator and he shows no remorse for it. Reinaldo Arenas had some choice words for men like Michael Moore who chose willingly to collaborate with Castro:

One day, eventually, the people will overthrow Castro, and the least they will do is bring to justice those who collaborated with the tyrant with impunity. The one who promote dialogue with Castro, well aware that Castro will never give up his power peacefully and that a truce and economic assistance are what he needs to strengthen his position, are as guilty as his own henchmen who torture and murder people. Those who are not living in Cuba are perhaps even more to blame, because inside Cuba you exist under absolute terror, but outside you can at least maintain a modicum of political integrity. All the pretentious people who dream of appearing on TV shaking Fidel Castro’s hand and of becoming politically relevant should have more realistic dreams: they should envision the rope from which they will swing in Havana’s Central Park, because the Cuban people, being generous, will hang them when their moment of truth comes. The only consolation for them will be to have avoided bloodshed.

Michael Moore is not an innocent party. He knew what he was showing the world was not the truth about Cuba and he did it anyway. He lied to the world and desecrated the memory of Reinaldo Arenas and all the brave men and women who have fought for the truth to come out about the real Cuba like Reinaldo Arenas.  In his zeal to attack the United States government Michael Moore ignored the plight of the Cuban people and nullified their struggle for freedom. He twisted the truth to fit his agenda without any thought to those who might be hurt by this and ignored whatever facts didn’t fit with his agenda.

Michael Moore is a liar, a collaborator, and a maker of propaganda. He has shown no regard at all for the truly brave men like Reinaldo Arenas who spent their lives fighting for their art and their truth. It is Reinaldo Arenas we should respect and believe, not Michael Moore. It is Reinaldo Arenas we should honor for his fight for truth, not Michael More. And it is the work of Reinaldo Arenas that should live on in people’s minds and hearts, not the work of Michael Moore.

Shame on you, Michael Moore. Eternal shame on you for what you have done.

I rest my case.

---

A personal epilogue from the author to Reinaldo Arenas:


Look, Reinaldo, look! The moon is bright and full; she is back and smiling at you once again. Her light fills the breezeway and the shower of gold bush Adolfina planted there perfumes the air so sweetly. Celestino is calling you from the woods, Reinaldo. He is at it again, carving poems into the trunks of the almond trees and he wants you to help. Go to him, Reinaldo. Your work here is done. You have given me your gifts and your truths and I will hold these things dear to me for the rest of my life. Run to the woods and be free, Reinaldo. You have earned it. You are free.

Thank you, Reinaldo. 

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1:25 - Made movie for people who don’t agree with me

3:00 - secret Nixon tapes, providing less care for profits

4:15 - Woman dropped for having yeast infection

6:10 - anti-Moore websites, criticism of Roger & Me, “When people make up stuff like that, they hope that people haven’t seen the movie or have forgotten it”

9:15 - people won’t scam a socialized system

9:45 - “the money part’s the easy part”, other countries pay less, easier to see a doctor

11:20 - other countries and preventative medicine

12:30 - “me” society vs. “we” society

13:30 - sent money to guy with website

15:10 - called him before movie came out, gave because I have values, did it as example to other liberals

17:00 - citizens’ job to vote for the right people, gov’t used to work better

18:45 - left/right need to come together

20:05 - bush, etc. haven’t been in military

21:20 - O&A are funny and satirical

22:20 - don’t believe anything you read about me

23:05 - anti-Moore guy thanked me

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The medical care in countries with socialized medicine is still free. Gupta doesn’t seem to grasp that. Here in America, when you go to the library and check out a book, it’s free. When the fire department puts out a fire at your house, it’s free. In Canada, when you go into the hospital for chemotherapy, it’s free. You don’t walk out with a bill. Yes, citizens pay higher taxes in countries with socialized medicine, but they don’t pay the premiums, co-pays, deductibles and other out-of-pocket medical costs that we face in America. Moreover, in other industrialized countries citizens are not bankrupted by huge bills during a medical crisis – as is the case in America, where the leading cause of bankruptcy is medical bills.

Apart from the absurdity of the semantic games, there’s another cost that Michael’s not including, as I have said many times—opportunity cost.  There is no cost in this world greater than opportunity cost. And no cost harder to see. For example, the citizens of socialist countries don’t see the incredible healthcare systems they’d have had they remained private—because they don’t exist.  All they is the great slime engine edifice of “single payer healthcare”. 

Eliminating the evil profits in medicine will destroy innovation.  The biggest cost of a socialized system will be the revolutionary drugs and surgical methods that we won’t get in the future because the profit motive is gone. The motto of our modern political culture seems to be: “Children are the future . . . today belongs to me!” Socialized medicine may get us “free” pills and surgeries. But the price may be our grandchildren dying of drug-resistant TB or never getting a cure for Alzheimer’s.

That’s not a price I’m willing to pay.  Especially as I won’t be one getting the bill.

The Pravda Squad then gets into Paul Keckley.  Apparently, Keckley is full of crap because he once worked for the same organization as Tommy Thompson, donated some money to Republicans and worked for EBM, which has healthcare clients.

I despise these guilt by association arguments that Moore is so fond of.  And I hate it when Republicans do it too. It’s a pure opponent slime.  Don’t respond to their arguments, imply they are biased because of a distant relation with someone else. So we can ignore what Pat Michaels says about global warming because Cato gets a small amount of money from oil companies.  On the flip side, global warming skeptics say we can ignore the issue because the environmentalist movement has some old Commies in it.

Michael Moore is essentially saying that we can’t trust the fact-checking of anyone who is connected to politics (or maybe it’s just Republicans) or the healthcare industry.  By my count, that means the only person we can trust is . . . Michael Moore.

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An Open Letter to CNN from Michael Moore

7/14/07

Dear CNN,

Well, the week is over—and still no apology, no retraction, no correction of your glaring mistakes.

I bet you thought my dust-up with Wolf Blitzer was just a cool ratings coup, that you really wouldn’t have to correct the false statements you made about “Sicko.” I bet you thought I was just going to go quietly away.

Think again. I’m about to become your worst nightmare. ‘Cause I ain’t ever going away. Not until you set the record straight, and apologize to your viewers. “The Most Trusted Name in News?” I think it’s safe to say you can retire that slogan.

You have an occasional segment called “Keeping Them Honest.” But who keeps you honest? After what the public saw with your report on “Sicko,” and how many inaccuracies that report contained, how can anyone believe anything you say on your network? In the old days, before the Internet, you could get away with it. Your victims had no way to set the record straight, to show the viewers how you had misrepresented the truth. But now, we can post the truth—and back it up with evidence and facts—on the web, for all to see. And boy, judging from the mail both you and I have been receiving, the evidence I have posted on my site about your “Sicko” piece has led millions now to question your honesty.

I won’t waste your time rehashing your errors. You know what they are. What I want to do is help you come clean. Admit you were wrong. What is the shame in that? We all make mistakes. I know it’s hard to admit it when you’ve screwed up, but it’s also liberating and cathartic. It not only makes you a better person, it helps prevent you from screwing up again. Imagine how many people will be drawn to a network that says, “We made a mistake. We’re human. We’re sorry. We will make mistakes in the future—but we will always correct them so that you know you can trust us.” Now, how hard would that really be?

As you know, I hold no personal animosity against you or any of your staff. You and your parent company have been very good to me over the years. You distributed my first film, “Roger & Me” and you published “Dude, Where’s My Country?” Larry King has had me on twice in the last two weeks. I couldn’t ask for better treatment.

That’s why I was so stunned when you let a doctor who knows a lot about brain surgery—but apparently very little about public policy—do a “fact check” story, not on the medical issues in “Sicko,” but rather on the economic and political information in the film. Is this why there has been a delay in your apology, because you are trying to get a DOCTOR to say he was wrong? Please tell him not to worry, no one is filing a malpractice claim against him. Dr. Gupta does excellent and compassionate stories on CNN about people’s health and how we can take better care of ourselves. But when it came time to discuss universal health care, he rushed together a bunch of sloppy—and old—research. When his producer called us about his report the day before it aired, we sent to her, in an email, all the evidence so that he wouldn’t make any mistakes on air. He chose to ignore ALL the evidence, and ran with all his falsehoods—even though he had been given the facts a full day before! How could that happen? And now, for 5 days, I have posted on my website, for all to see, every mistake and error he made.

You, on the other hand, in the face of this overwhelming evidence and a huge public backlash, have chosen to remain silent, probably praying and hoping this will all go away.

Well it isn’t. We are now going to start looking into the veracity of other reports you have aired on other topics. Nothing you say now can be believed. In 2002, the New York Times busted you for bringing celebrities on your shows and not telling your viewers they were paid spokespeople for the pharmaceutical companies. You promised never to do it again. But there you were, in 2005, talking to Joe Theismann, on air, as he pushed some drug company-sponsored website on prostate health. You said nothing about about his affiliation with GlaxoSmithKline.

Clearly, no one is keeping you honest, so I guess I’m going to have to do that job, too. $1.5 billion is spent each year by the drug companies on ads on CNN and the other four networks. I’m sure that has nothing to do with any of this. After all, if someone gave me $1.5 billion, I have to admit, I might say a kind word or two about them. Who wouldn’t?!

I expect CNN to put this matter to rest. Say you’re sorry and correct your story—like any good journalist would.

Then we can get back to more important things. Like a REAL discussion about our broken health care system. Everything else is a distraction from what really matters.

Yours,
Michael Moore
[email protected]
www.michaelmoore.com

P.S. If you also want to apologize for not doing your job at the start of the Iraq War, I’m sure most Americans would be very happy to accept your apology. You and the other networks were willing partners with Bush, flying flags all over the TV screens and never asking the hard questions that you should have asked. You might have prevented a war. You might have saved the lives of those 3,610 soldiers who are no longer with us. Instead, you blew air kisses at a commander in chief who clearly was making it all up. Millions of us knew that—why didn’t you? I think you did. And, in my opinion, that makes you responsible for this war. Instead of doing the job the founding fathers wanted you to do—keeping those in power honest (that’s why they made it the FIRST amendment)—you and much of the media went on the attack against the few public figures like myself who dared to question the nightmare we were about to enter. You’ve never thanked me or the Dixie Chicks or Al Gore for doing your job for you. That’s OK. Just tell the truth from this point on.

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Fidel Castro said Wednesday the island’s communist system has become plagued by “irritating inequalities and privileges” that have left the poor bitter and angry.

Turning a more critical eye on Cuban life than he has since falling ill and giving up power almost a year ago, the 80-year-old Castro said in an essay published in state-run newspapers “we are not a consumer society.”

But he bemoaned that some Cubans use foreign currency sent from relatives abroad or brought to the island by tourists to set up illegal sources of profit. This while they continue to enjoy ration cards, free housing and health care and other social services.

“Not everyone receives convertible currency from abroad, something which is not illegal but which at times creates irritating inequalities and privileges in a country that does its utmost to supply vital services free of charge to the entire population,” Cuba’s “Maximum Leader” wrote in the essay titled “self-criticism of Cuba.”

Ration cards.  This is a country so poor they have fucking ration cards for God’s sake.  And what is the ration? 20 oz of beans per month.

But hey, they get all the free shitty third-world healthcare they like.  It’s a hell of a trade off.

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Did you catch it? 

I don’t like Ron Paul.  I know he’s not a real Republican (not that being one is such a great thing!).  I know he’s a hardcore, big “L” Libertarian with some ideas even the Libertarian Party doesn’t like.  That being said...I dislike him based on him.  Ron’s public positions are wonky, but it was his appearance on Colbert that solidified it for me.  I could never vote for someone with such ridiculous ideas about how government can work.  I’m a fan of anything that reduces the size of the federal machine, but this guy’s a nut.  Given the chance he’d abolish virtually every department and leave us in so much trouble we can’t begin to fathom it.  None of that matters, though.  It’s not about Ron Paul and his specific policies.  Not for Michael Moore.

Moore openly admits in this video that it doesn’t matter who the candidate is.  It doesn’t matter what they stand for.  It doesn’t matter what they want to do with the country.  Watch it for yourself.  I’m not spinning this.  He actually says he’s “genetically prohibited from voting with anyone with a Republican next to their name” and that the problem with Paul is that he “has the wrong letter of the alphabet next to his name.”

Moore is nothing more than a cheap partisan hack.  He’s not interested in unity.  he’s not interested in what is best for the nation.  He doesn’t care about getting the best people for the job.  he just cheerleads for the Democrats.  On the one hand he pretends to be critical, but here it is, from his own mouth: It would not matter how great, qualified or needed a candidate is, if they are a Republican - even a fake one like Ron Paul - Moore refuses to consider the person.

Remember that the next time he’s talking about the “we, not me” concept.  What he means is “We as long as you agree with me and aren’t one of those dirty, filthy Republicans.”

Thanks to Brian for sending this to me.

Update from Lee: For any of you who think there might be something to this, let me ask you a couple of questions.  Every time they demolish a hotel in Las Vegas there’s always a news story about how they did it.  The demolition crews go into detail about how they spend weeks, if not months, carting in wiring and explosives.  They’re positioned in exactly the right spot to make the building implode.  Demolishing a building is almost as much a marvel of engineering wizardry as building it.

Now, think of the WTC.  Are any of you out there seriously going to tell me that, for the month before 9/11, crews of workers were able to cart in enough explosives to bring down the towers, hide these enormous explosive charges in inconspicuous boxes and such, run wires through the buildings, and NOT ONE PERSON saw them doing it?  Out of the 50,000 people or so (including Port Authority police) who worked in that building, nobody noticed work crews setting up huge explosive charges?

Give me a break.  You have to REALLY want to believe in a conspiracy if you’re willing to believe something that completely asinine.

Now, as to the Pentagon cameras.  I guess it never occurred to Mikey that maybe, just maybe, letting every terrorist in the world know where the cameras at the Pentagon are located is a good idea.  In order for there to be a conspiracy about the Pentagon then you also have to believe the WTC was detonated, unless you think that it was a total coincidence that terrorists attacked the Pentagon the day the Bushitler blew up the WTC.  I have no ida why those tapes haven’t been released, though I very easily could see legitimate national security reasons for them not doing so.

Crazy Arab Muslim terrorists blew up the Pentagon and WTC.  And now, for the rest of my life, I’m going to have to listen to fucking Moore and his ilk talk about the double super secret ultra mega conspiracy behind it all.

Ugh.  It’s like the Kennedy assassination.  No amount of evidence will ever be good enough.

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DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN: “(Moore says) the United States slipped to number 37 in the world’s health care systems. It’s true. ... Moore brings a group of patients, including 9/11 workers, to Cuba and marvels at their free treatment and quality of care. But hold on - that WHO list puts Cuba’s health care system even lower than the United States, coming in at #39.”

THE TRUTH: “But hold on?” ‘SiCKO’ clearly shows the WHO list, with the United States at number #37, and Cuba at #39. Right up on the screen in big five-foot letters. It’s even in the trailer! CNN should have its reporter see his eye doctor. The movie isn’t hiding from this fact. Just the opposite: CNN hid the facts on Cuba But ‘SiCKO’ has the facts right up front.

So it’s shown on screen, but not mentioned in blazing great letters.  And not shouted at the top of their lungs.

The fact that the healthcare system in an impoverished nation crippled by our decades-old blockade (including medical supplies and drugs) ranks so closely to ours is more an indictment of the American system than the Cuban system. Although Cuba ranks lower overall than the United States, it still has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life span. (see below) And unlike the United States, Cuba offers healthcare to absolutely everyone. In an independent Gallup poll conducted in Cuba, “a near unanimous 96 percent of respondents say that health care in Cuba is accessible to everyone.”

As I noted in a previous post, you can’t just take the WHO rankings and not know what they mean. Cuba is only ranked as high as it is because the medicine is “fair” - i.e., it’s equally crappy.  Hell, I’d agree their crappy care is “accessible to everyone”. But in the same WHO report Cuba ranks 115th in responsiveness and 33rd in overall health (we’re 22nd).  It’s comparitively high ranking is because it is 118th in spending. It’s always cheap to die.  And a totalitarian system will always keep gun violence and over-eating down.  It also keeps the AIDS rate down by jailing anyone who tests positive.

CNN: “Moore asserts that the American health care system spends $7,000 per person on health. Cuba spends $25 dollars per person. Not true. But not too far off. The United States spends $6,096 per person, versus $229 per person in Cuba.”

THE TRUTH: According to our own government – the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Health Expenditures Projections – the United States will spend $7,092 per capita on health in 2006 and $7,498 in 2007. As for Cuba – Dr. Gupta and CNN need to watch ‘SiCKO’ first before commenting on it. ‘SiCKO’ says Cuba spends $251 per person on health care, not $25, as Gupta reports.

Gupta admitted his error on $25—see, Michael, that’s what responsible people do. 

And the BBC reports that Cuba’s per capita health expenditure is… $251! This is confirmed by the United Nations Human Development Report, 2006. Yup, Cuba spends $251 per person on health care. As Gupta points out, the World Health Organization does calculate Cuba’s per capita health expenditure at $229 per person. We chose to use the UN numbers, a minor difference - and $229 is a lot closer to $251 than $25.

Gupta is quoting numbers from the same report—he is comparing apples to apples.  Michael Moore is mixing sources to deliberately make the US look as bad as possible. Mike, you can’t just pick the highest number you can find for the US and the lowest you can find for Cuba.  According to the 2000 WHO report which everyone loves, the numbers are $131 and $4187, respectively.  According to the UNHDR you cite above for the $251 figure, America spends $5,711.  But that apparently wasn’t bad enough, so your scrambled around until you could find a bigger number.

Besides, Michael, do you think your movies would be better if you were paid a 20th of what you currently are?

CNN: In fact, Americans live just a little bit longer than Cubans on average.

THE TRUTH: Just the opposite. The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report’s human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5 years. It is 77.6 years in Cuba.

Again, you have to take into account the source.  Gupta was using a different source.  Notice Michael switches again to the resource that shows the worst case for the US. According to the 2000 WHO report that Mike uses when it suits him, Cuba’s life expectancy was 73.5 and 77.4 for men and women, respectively.  It was 73.8 and 79.7 in the United States. Not bad for what Moore himself would call the violentist place on Earth.

Where is Michael getting his figure from?  An obscure publication having mostly to do with development and public health.  They get their numbers from an obscure 2005 United Nations conference.  Much as I criticize the WHO report, I’ll take their numbers.

CNN: The United States ranks highest in patient satisfaction.

THE TRUTH: True, but even when the WHO took patient satisfaction into account in its comprehensive review of the world’s health systems, we still came in at #37.

More dissembling.  Gupta acknowledged we rank 37th. And I noted below, we rank 37th because our healthcare system isn’t socialized.

Patients may be satisfied in America, but not everyone gets to be a patient. 47 million are uninsured and are rarely patients - until it’s too late. In the rest of the Western world, everyone and anyone can be a patient because everyone is covered. (And don’t face exclusions for pre-existing conditions, co-pays, deductibles, and costly monthly premiums). It’s not that other countries are unhappy with their health care – for example, “70 to 80 percent of Canadians find their waiting times acceptable.”

The health care wonks have backed off their claim that “no one gets healthcare” since people like me have pointed out that it’s illegal to turn away patients.  But Moore is deceptive when he says our numbers are inflated by leaving out 47 millions people—who are patients, by the way—because the #1 ranking comes from a household survey, not a patient survey.

CNN: Americans have shorter wait times than everyone but Germans when seeking non-emergency elective procedures, like hip replacement, cataract surgery, or knee repair.

THE TRUTH: This isn’t the whole truth. CNN pulled out a statistic about elective procedures.

Um, which part of “non-emergency elective procedures” did you not understand, Mike? 

Of the six countries surveyed in that study (United States, Canada, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Australia) only Canada had longer waiting times than America for sick adults waiting to schedule a doctor’s appointment for a medical problem. 81% of patients in New Zealand got a same or next-day appointment for a non-routine visit, 71% in Britain, 69% in Germany, 66% in Australia, 47% in the U.S., and 36% in Canada.

When we’re talking about wait times, we’re not talking about whether it takes one days or one week to get an appointment with your PCP (another artifact of our unhealthy nation is doctors being swamped).  We’re talking about getting surgery in a week against getting it in a year.  And no one would question that it’s easy to see a doctor in a socialized system.  We’re questioning the difficult of getting complex expensive treatment.

But do you want to fix this?  Remove the laws that limit the number of doctors our nation can graduate or give visas to.  Wait times in Texas are plunging because our malpractice reform is bringing them in.  Loosen the restrictions on nurse practitioners to allow them to act as cheaper PCPs.  In other words, get the government to stop doing certain things.

“Gerard Anderson, a Johns Hopkins health policy professor who has spent his career examining the world’s healthcare, said there are delays, but not as many as conservatives state. In Canada, the United Kingdom and France, ‘three percent of hospital discharges had delays in treatment,’ Anderson told The Miami Herald. ‘That’s a relatively small number, and they’re all elective surgeries, such as hip and knee replacement.’

“Three percent of hospital discharges had delays in treatment”.  That phrase should trigger alarm bells in the left side of your brain.  If people die on the waiting list or in the hospital, they don’t get counted.  If people are just getting their knee prodded, that counts as a non-delay.  The proper figure is what percentage of serious health ailments have to wait months for treatment.  And as we’ll see below, it’s quite high.

One way America is able to achieve decent waiting times is that it leaves 47 million people out of the health care system entirely, unlike any other Western country. When you remove 47 million people from the line, your wait should be shorter.

Notice that Mike contradicts himself here.  He says that our wait times are only good for elective surgeries but then says we’ve left 47 million people out.  But would those 47 million people be getting prompt elective surgeries under a socialized system?  What the hell is he arguing—that if we socialize medicine and bring elective surgeries to 47 million people, our wait times will get worse?  That’s what we’re saying!

And there are even more Americans who keep themselves out of the system because of cost - in the United States, 24 percent of the population did not get medical care due to cost. That number is 5 percent in Canada, and 3 percent in the UK. 

24 percent of Americans don’t get healthcare because of cost? That sounds a bit high, considering that only 16% are uninsured and 50% are on the government’s dime.  And did they not get care or did they merely delay it or forgo certain treatments? That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  If people were more aware of the cost of medicine, they might forgo unnecessary doctor visits and tests—as I did when I was uninsured.  I’ve also delayed buying a television, buying a car and seeing movies because of cost.  And of course people in socialized medical systems are not hindered by costs—they’re not paying the bills!

One more thing.  The survey Mike cites on people delaying care because of costs?  It also shows that only 5% of Americans wait more than four months for care—against 27% in Canada, 38% in the UK, 23% in Australia and 26% in New Zealand.  And notably, all five systems have gotten worse between 1988 and 2001 due to aging populations.  But he’ll leave that tidbit out.  He’ll quote a Johns Hopkins researcher on healthcare delays, but quote this report on costs.  Again, he’s mixing sources to make America look as bad as possible.

CNN: (PAUL KECKLEY-Deloitte Health Care Analyst): “The concept that care is free in France, in Canada, in Cuba - and it’s not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes. As a proportion of their household income, it’s a significant number … (GUPTA): It’s true that the French pay higher taxes, and so does nearly every country ahead of the United States on that list.”

THE TRUTH: ‘SiCKO’ never claims that health care is provided absolutely for free in other countries, without tax contributions from citizens. Former MP Tony Benn reads from the NHS founding pamphlet, which explicitly states that “this is not a charity. You are paying for it mainly as taxpayers.” ‘SiCKO’ also acknowledges that the French are “drowning in taxes.”

OK, I’ve now got to see the movie soon.  Does he really claim this?  Anyone?

Comparatively, many Americans are drowning in insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays and medical debt and the resulting threat of bankruptcy – half of all bankruptcies in the United States are triggered by medical bills.

Socializing our medical system will not magically make it more efficient—as I’ve shown, Medicare’s overhead is more like 20-30% than 1-3%.  The high-paid insurance execs will be replaced by high-paid government hacks. Note that by Moore’s own argument, taxes will have to rise to equal our current expenditures.

The only way to cut costs is by rationing or stiffing the providers.  Stiffing the doctors is a popular meme.  And maybe you want to go to a doctor who is being paid as much as a gas station attendant.  But I don’t.

CNN: “But even higher taxes don’t guarantee the coverage everyone wants … (KECKLEY): 15 to 20 percent of the population will purchase services outside the system of care run by the government.”

THE TRUTH: It’s not clear what country Keckley is referring to. In the United Kingdom, only 11.5 percent of the population has supplementary insurance, but it doesn’t take the place of NHS insurance. Nobody in France buys insurance that replaces government insurance either, although a substantial amount buys some form of complimentary insurance.

Again, missing the point.  Keckley didn’t say that they were replacing socialized medicine.  He said they are supplementing it.  And there is a range of values for various nations.  Moore disputes the 15-20 percent range with a figure from a single country.  Also, keep in mind, Moore wants private insurance to be illegal.

CNN: “But no matter how much Moore fudged the facts, and he did fudge some facts…”

This is libel. There is not a single fact that is “fudged” in the film. No one has proven a single fact in the film wrong. We expect CNN to correct their mistakes on the air and to apologize to their viewers.

Pot.  Kettle.  And as we’re documenting on this website, you can fudge the facts plenty without getting any “facts” wrong.  Just mix up your statistical sources, leave out critical information and imply things that aren’t true.  It’s the sneaky lies of a child—“Gee, I can’t tell you who broke that vase!”

I’ll tell you what, Mike.  I’ll join your call for CNN to apologize (although they already did apologize for the $25 mistake).  When you apologize to the NRA for implying they were part of the Klan. Or apologize to Charleton Heston’s spirit for editing his quotes together to make him look bad.  Or apologize about the war plaque.  Or saying the Columbine factory made nukes. Or of the hundreds of people you have unfairly maligned, quoted out of context. Or apologizing for your distortion of the Mychelle Williams situation.  Or…

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Overall Health: This is actually two measures—one of average health and one of “distribution”, which is statspeak for “fairness”.  The two numbers are similar enough to be the same and I’m really not sure what he point of “distribution” is.  Healthy people aren’t living to be 300 and having 87 healthy babies to skew the numbers that badly.

The rating is mainly based on lifespan and infant mortality.  By these measures, the United States ranks 22nd worldwide.

22nd is nothing to be proud of, but there are number of problems with taking this ranking as a measure of our healthcare system.  For one thing the United States is the most obese nation on Earth.  The Health Nazis are constantly telling us this is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. The WHO does not account for this. Nor does it account for the US being the most violent nation in its peer group, as Michael Moore would be the first to tell you. 

I’m not 100% sure based on my reading of WHO’s methodology, but they also appear not to account for the US system going to heroic lengths to save extremely premature babies who are simply listed as “stillborn” in other nations.  This has a tendency to skew both our infant mortality and lifespan numbers.

Responsiveness: This is a measure of how easy it is to get a doctor, a procedure or surgery.  How quickly the healthcare system will treat you when you get sick.

The United States ranks #1.  I repeat, the United States has the most responsive healthcare system in the world, according to WHO.  By comparison, idyllic France ranks 16th.  Perfect Canada ranks 7th.  And the little island paradise Michael Moore visited?

115th. (Damn those Cubans thinking for themselves!)

Responsiveness actually tracks extremely well with the customer satisfaction measured in other surveys (in which the US ranks #1 by a long shot as well).  So whatever Michael Moore may think of our healthcare system, we appear to be happy with it.

Fairness in Financial Contribution. This is the key to understanding the WHO rankings.  The United States ranks 54th in this dubious category.  Fairness essentially measures the skew of healthcare expenditures.  And we find that, low and behold, the very sick in this country tend to rack up a lot of bills.  If our system were socialized, the burden would be distributed more “fairly” and ranking would be higher.

The thing is, even you Moore-ons out there will have to admit that this statistic is unfair to the United States, no matter what you think of fairness or socialized medicine.  To illustrate why, let me return to the aforementioned premature babies.  An extremely premature baby can rack up $200,000 in medical bills.  This is obviously far greater than the average $6,000 each American spends and will skew the numbers.  Of course, insurance will pay that for most Americans.  And the others, at worst, will go bankrupt and the hospital will write it off.  Of course, we’d have more in the former category if it were possible to buy cheap “disasater scenario” health insurance, but I digress.

A massive skew is the natural result of having an innovative healthcare system.  The United States invests enormous amounts of time and treasure into developing cutting edge technology—procedures and drugs that start out being extraordinarily expensive but eventually become cheaper and find their way into the socialized nations of the world.  It is a simple fact that the pioneers who are the first to try advanced anti-retrovirals, artificial hearts and stem cell transplants will also rack up gigantic bills when they do so.

And while one could argue that maybe the government should pick up the tab for experimental procedures, I’m extremely loathe to have a bunch of lawyers deciding what experimental procedures should and should not be done.

If we want to improve the “fairness” of our financial burden, we should just let these people die.  As I like to say—dying is always cheap.  And in a socialized medical system, that’s almost certainly what would happen.

In any case, you can now see why I don’t like the WHO’s ranking of the US being used as an argument for socialized medicine.  Because you are essentially arguing that medicine should be socialized because . . . it’s not socialized.  In science, we call that circular logic.  At Moorewatch, we call it bullshit.

Returning to the subject—these three measures produce a composite number called:

Overall Goal Attainment: This is WHO’s measure of healthcare system quality, socialism and all.  The United States ranks 15th, not 37th.  I repeat, we rank 15th, even when “fairness” is accounted for.  Update: Looking back at their methodology, fairness in health, responsiveness and financial burden is weighted a total of five times as much as customer satisfaction. You can’t let the numbers be biased by those damn morons being satisfied with their unfair systems!

So where does the much-ballyhooed 37th ranking come from?  It’s the WHO’s final number, which is a measure of efficiency—i.e., we have the 15th best healthcare system at the #1 price so we have the 37th best “deal” in the world.

Of course, I’m not sure I want a Consumer Reports “best buy” if I’m getting a pacemaker installed.

But efficiency is a stupid way to measure the quality of a healthcare system.  The more challenges a healthcare system is presented with, the less efficient it will be.  It will spend more money but its populace will still lag in health indicators.

The United States spends more money on healthcare than anyone else in the world. But healthy people don’t spend much on healthcare—they are “efficient”.  Unhealthy people, on the other hand, tend to spend a lot of money on doctors. And the United States is a very unhealthy nation - at least by first world standards.  And we are unhealthy not because of a lack of preventive medicine or “fairness”—we are an unhealthy nation because we eat, drink, smoke, shoot and snort too much and exercise too little.

But now you can see the reason for this post.  By saying “we have the 37th best system at the #1 price” you are double-counting the expense.  The 37th ranking already accounts for our spending.

There are three, no four, ways of looking at the WHO analysis:

You can claim that we have the 15th “fairest” healthcare system in the world at the #1 price.

You can claim that we’re #1 in customer satisfaction at the #1 price.

Or you can claim that we have 37th best “deal”.

Or you can dismiss it as a bad way of measuring a complex problem.

But you can’t run around and repeat 37-at-1 like some mantra.  Because it’s just not true.

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First let’s look at the “free” exchange.  Gupta challenges moore on the idea that healthcare is free, which is generally considered to mean “at no cost.”

also think the whole idea, Michael, of just calling it a free system I think is a little bit nebulous to people who don’t fully understand what you mean by that. Yes, you’ve got to raise taxes significantly. I mean France is drowning in taxes. They’re running a $15.6 billion debt. I mean it’s very hard to pay for this sort of thing. And to just call it free and say it’s free, I think, makes it very—it’s murky, Michael, at best. And I think that’s what I have difficulty with when you’re trying to really advance a scenario here where we can get health care for everybody.

After a little chatter Moore and Gupta get into a volley.

GUPTA: No. Let me—you would have to agree that people would walk away from your film with the perception that health care is free in Canada.

MOORE: Yes.

GUPTA: I mean you’re a filmmaker.

MOORE: It is free.

GUPTA: You know how to do this sort of thing.

MOORE: It is free.

GUPTA: You pay for it through taxes—

MOORE: It is free.

GUPTA: I mean, in France, there’s a 13.5 percent—

MOORE: Yes. We pay for it—

GUPTA:—payroll tax.

MOORE: We pay.

GUPTA: There’s a 5 percent income tax. That’s in addition to a—

MOORE: Hey, when will I get to say something here?

GUPTA: Go ahead.

KING: All right, Sanjay.

Go ahead, Michael.

MOORE: Man, oh, man.

KING: Go ahead.

MOORE: Yes—GUPTA: We’ve got Michael Moore speechless. That’s pretty hard to do here.

MOORE: Well, no, it’s just I—well, it’s—I’m not going—I’m trying to say something here and he just went on with another diatribe about this.

Note the way he refused to answer a simple, direct question.  If you assemble the fragmented sentences together, this is how the conversation went.

GUPTA:  “Michael, even you would have to agree that people would walk away from your film with the perception that health care is free in Canada.  I mean you’re a filmmaker, you know how to do this sort of thing.  Healthcare in Canada isn’t free.  Canadians pay for it through taxes, like payroll tax.  There’s also 5 percent income tax, and that’s in addition to other taxes.”

MOORE:  “It’s free.  It’s free.  Hey, am I going to get to say something?  Man, oh man.”

So, you can clearly see how he totally dodged answering a completely legitimate question, even using the lame Ross Perot trick of claiming that he isn’t being given time to talk.  The banter goes back and forth.  Again Gupta asks Moore the questsion.

GUPTA: Mike, I don’t disagree with any of that. The point is, though, and I think you would have to concede this point, Michael, that you are trying to lead people to believe, again, people who are really concerned about this issue, that it is free in these other countries. And that is what I think is (INAUDIBLE)—

MOORE: It is free.

Again, he won’t admit that “free” care is paid for by massive taxes and thus not “free.” So Gupta tries a third time.

GUPTA: Why do they have such a high debt in France? Why are they paying so much more in taxes?

MOORE: The difference—the difference is, is that in those countries, if you get sick, you never have to worry about whether or not you’re going to be able to afford to pay for it. That’s the difference. And when you’ve got 47 million people in this country with no health insurance, they don’t go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.

He dodges the question again, and changes the subject to what the French get in benefits.  The question was about how the French actually pay for this stuff, and Moore switches the conversation back to what they get.  Why?  Because he knows Americans will never embrace a system when the cost is so high a tax rate. 

Next Gupta asks Moore another completely appropriate question.

GUPTA: Michael, one of the best examples of health care, at least some sort of universal health care, would be Medicare. I think you would agree with that.

MOORE: Yes --

Okay, we’re on the same page here.  When you think of universal healthcare, Medicare is a good example of what we can expect.  Gupta then asks:

It’s going to go bankrupt by 2019. It’s going to be $28 trillion in debt by 2075. Look, I believe the very measure of a great society is in how we take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. But would you say that this is going to be still a working system 20 years from now?

Okay, one of the best examples of what we can expect from universal healthcare is going to be bankrupt in 12 years.  Remember, this is the system that Moore is advocating.  Surely he can explain how a similar fate will not befall universal coverage?  Here’s Moore’s response.

Not if we keep—not if we keep spending $100 billion a year on a war, no. We won’t have money for our own people.

The Iraq War has cost us roughly half a trillion so far.  Let’s say it lasts 10 years and round it up to an even trillion for when it’s all said and done.  The GDP of the United States is $13 trillion.  So, even subtracting the entire cost of the Iraq War, we’re still $12 trillion flush, and that’s the GDP of one year, not ten.

Do you see what Moore did, liberals?  This is sleight of hand.  Gupta asked him about the solvency of Medicare, and Moore not only didn’t answer him, he switched to the subject of war.  This way now all you’re thinking about is the war, and not the fact that he had no answer to Gupta’s completely legitimate question about how Moore plans to pay for all this stuff.

So, the next time you think that Moore has all the answers, keep your eyes open.  When he wants you to look at his right hand, always look at what his left is doing.

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Perhaps you have heard his name. Perhaps you’ve heard him mentioned in passing as one of, if not the greatest writer to ever emerge from Cuba. Perhaps you know his books have been published in dozens of languages all over the world, or that he has won several awards, including Best Foreign Novel in France for his book “Hallucinations”. Perhaps you might have heard of his autobiography, “Before Night Falls”, and that the editors of The New York Times Book Review hailed it as one of the fourteen best books of 1993. Or perhaps you might have seen the movie adaptation of “Before Night Falls”, a gritty and almost hallucinatory film directed by Julian Schnabel which garnered several Oscar nominations, including a Best Actor nod to Javier Bardiem who played Arenas.

Or perhaps you are one of the lucky ones, the ones who have been blessed enough to read the work of Reinaldo Arenas. Perhaps you have felt yourself transported into one of Arenas’ worlds, worlds of such texture and color and majesty that they take your breath away. Perhaps you have read and smelled the tulips growing in the breezeway that Adolfina planted, or the felt the grit of the guava paste Fortunato made. Perhaps you, as I do, look at things like the moon and the sea in a different way now because of the sheer power of Reinaldo Arenas’ words.

I can hear the questions beginning already. Why, Donna? Why, on Moorewatch, are you talking about this Cuban writer? What could Reinaldo Arenas possibly have to do with Michael Moore?

The answer, of course, is abundantly simple. Reinaldo Arenas has a very important story to tell about what life was like for him in Castro’s Cuba, and it is a story we all need to hear. After seeing how Moore depicted Cuban life in Sicko, it has become vital that we know and understand what Cuban life under the nightmarish dictatorship of Fidel Castro is truly like. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is that truth.

After nearly 15 years of hiding, exile, torture, work camps and prisons, Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape from Castro’s regime in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. He spent the next ten years of his life alternately finishing his tremendous body of work and denouncing the hellish Castro dictatorship to anyone who would listen. He wrote essays, letters, and lectured about life under Castro all over the world. In 1988 he wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro demanding that Castro hold a plebiscite similar to the one held in Chile by Pinochet. The letter drew thousands of signatures from around the world, including those of eight Nobel laureates. The letter was internationally published, drawing the wrath of Castro and his supporters.

When Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide in 1990 after a long and terrible battle with AIDS, he issued a suicide note that was published around the world. In that note, he wrote “you are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free.” Seventeen years later, his dream remains unrealized. Cuba is not free and Castro still rules the island with an iron fist. He is aided every day both by those support Castro’s illusion that Cuba is free and unoppressed, but also by those who know and remain silent.

Reinaldo Arenas would not remain silent. For twenty-five years Arenas fought – first to stay alive and then to scream to the world about the horrors that were happening in Cuba under Castro. Death silenced Arenas’ voice but not his spirit. His spirit lives on through his words and his work. His spirit lives on in his friends, his family, his supporters. And his spirit lives on in me, I who have been so moved by his work.

I am not Cuban or of Cuban descent. I have no Cuban relatives nor have I a drop of Cuban blood in my veins. What I am is simply a woman who has been so moved by the words of Reinaldo Arenas that I feel compelled to tell his story to the world, to fight as he did, to show the world the truth, his story and his truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is now silent, but I am not. Over the next few weeks I will tell you the story of Arenas’ life in Castro’s Cuba. It will amaze you, terrify you, bewilder you and move you. I want to you to listen to his story and know that it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is what it was like for Reinaldo Arenas. This is what it was like in living in constant terror under Castro’s iron fist in Cuba. This is what it is still like in Cuba. And until we all stand up and begin telling the truth and denouncing Fidel Castro as the oppressor and murderous dictator that he is, this is how it will always be in Cuba.

This is the story of Reinaldo Arenas….



“I come to speak your name so I may begin this dream again.” - Garden of Caressess



…to be continued in part two…

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“That’s the object of the health-insurance companies,” explains Henry Kahn, a physician, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist and Emory professor. “They make obscene profits by not paying for health care when people need it.”

This non-sequitur comes after a description of disability insurance, not health insurance.  But you always know you’re going into dangerous waters when the phrase “obscene profits” comes up.  If this professor or this writer can articulate the difference between a profit and a profit margin, I will eat my copy of Free to Choose.

I would also note it would be far more difficult for insurance companies to behave this way if the consumer’s power had not beenstripped away by the Feds.

The Smiths had health insurance. But as the illnesses claimed their toll on the Smiths’ health, America’s evil – that’s the only suitable word for it – system of medicine undermined the lives they’d worked decades to build.

This is the quote that practically has me shaking with rage.  Evil?  Evil?!  Evil?!?!  What precisely makes our healthcare system “evil”? That it has made AIDS, MS and diabetes controllable ailments? Or that it worsens its infant mortality and lifespan numbers by trying to save premies other nations let die? Oh, I know!  It’s the free care that millions of uninsured people get every day in hospitals around the country.

As much as I loathe HMOs, I can’t bring myself to call them evil.  Greedy, yes.  Stupid, no question.  But evil?  I can’t stand socialized medicine. I’ll call it stupid, misguided, destructive. But evil is quite a word to be opening up—and one that is particularly galling in a movie (and an editorial) that smiles approvingly on the murderous, thieving Fidel Castro.

Finally, Sugg’s talking about the Donna Smith sob story.  This is a 52 year-old woman who was ruined when she developed uterine cancer while her husband had arterial problems. I guess they’d be better off in a socialized system, where they probably would have been allowed to die. But at least they would have died cheaply.

Yes, those evil Fidel-loving commies have a wonderful health-care system – and they live an average of three years longer than Americans. The Cubans provided care comparable to anything in America – the same care every Cuban receives.

I don’t think I can say anything that will match the utter stupidity and moral vacuousness of this statement.  Well one thing. Sugg’s lying about their lifespan. I think he has Cuba confused with France, which does indeed have three years on us. This is an understandable mix-up (at least per-Sarkozy).  But I would argue the tragic French lack of violence, drug abuse and obesity might be a bigger factor than our “evil” healthcare system.

According to the World Health Organization, we spend proportionately more of our gross national product on health care than any other nation – yet we rank 37th in the performance of our medical industry. France, Italy, Spain, Oman, Austria and Japan top the list.

The big problem is the 30-some percent of our health-care dollars that are wasted on the insurance companies. By comparison, Medicare, the health program for oldsters, operates with about 3 percent administrative costs.

I dealt with these Numbers in the Dark in my Ebert Fisking. In short, Medicare doesn’t administer Medicare; and our 37th ranking is partially because we’re not socialized.

Here in Georgia, the rubes live under the illusion of rugged individualism – a myth propagated by those who steal our money. In voting for George Bush, Gov. Sonny Perdue and the rest of the GOP, middle-class Georgians elect pickpockets and thieves.

Yes, Democrats are so honest and true, it makes me weep. But notice that we now get the elitist condescension.  Those who oppose socialized medicine are just deluded “rubes” who don’t know no better, no sir. And “rugged individualism” is a four-letter word.  We’re all in this together—one big family. I’m sure Michael Moore feels our pain, too.

Kahn, for example, heads a group of physicians who tallied Georgia health-care expenditures for 2003 at $37 billion. By eliminating the insurance companies, Kahn says, we’d save $8 billion. “With that we could provide health care for everyone in Georgia, without decreasing what’s paid to doctors and hospitals, and we’d still save at least 2 percent of that $37 billion,” he says. “Everybody is covered and costs go down.” U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has proposed a similar national plan.

I’ve been spent half an hour trying to find an analogy to make a joke with.  I can’t.  The statement is so ignorant, it’s as if he said our healthcare system would be better off run by Martians. Again, this is based on the myth that Medicare’s overhead is 2% (but wait, earlier he said it was 3!). I’m sure that a money-vomiting government program with no supervision will be beautifully efficient.

Never ask a Leftist for financial advice, that’s all I can say.

But in some ways, this is precisely what free-marketers are suggesting.  With HSAs and greater insurance freedom, the consumer would have more money in his hands and more control over it.

Hello, Karl Marx. Call it socialized medicine if you want.

Thanks, I will!

But America is on life support that only a single-payer, no-insurance-company system, one that also regulates drug companies like utilities, can cure.

America is getting really stupid editorials written in alternative magazines.  It’s a crisis that only government regulation of the media can cure.  Calling the Fairness Doctrine!

And regulating drug companies like utilities? This would be the same regulation that caused massive blackouts in California and, according to the Left, is destroying the planet with fossil fuels.

But the comparison is just plain stupid.  My water company puts water in my house.  Water is not terribly complicated. The universe pretty much got it down 300,000 years after the Big Bang. It’s not going to suddenly mutate into a human-resistant strain of water. And plumbing goes back thousands of years. The biggest challenge my water company has is a burst main.  The water company is not going to invest millions of dollars into some experimental water only to get the daylights sued out of them when it turns out that, here’s a surprise, people with heart conditions have heart attacks.

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What’s the problem with government health systems? Moore’s movie doesn’t ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country’s National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they “would not be happy” to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore’s rosy view of the British health care system in “Sicko,” Christopher wrote, “What he hasn’t done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have.” Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown — just installed this week as Britain’s new prime minister — had promised to inaugurate “sweeping domestic reforms” to, among other things, “improve health care.”

Moore’s most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks’ vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who’s reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he’s finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can’t have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can’t. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, “Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent.” Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, “plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target.” Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it’s “free.”

Trust me, read the whole thing.

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