October 12, 2007
ABC: Always Bending to Castro
The video evidence about Cuba's real healthcare system that ABC was afraid to air.
On Wednesday night, Hannity and Colmes aired never-before-seen video of real Cuban hospitals on Fox News Channel. The journey of this video from Havana to New York and over the American airwaves is a long and complicated one but one that reveals the nature of big media in America.
The person who filmed the footage is a dissident doctor by the name of Dr. Darsi Ferrer Ramirez. You can read more about him in a WALL STREET JOURNAL column that has been reproduced here.
fidel castro derives his power from propaganda, which is what keeps his image as a benevolent dictator alive in the international community. The regime has had 48 years of practice of telling people outside what they want to hear. And mainly that means talking about how a perfect egalitarian society does exist and it's just 90 miles away from the terrible imperialist, capitalist United States of America. In the worker's paradise everyone gets "free" healthcare and education, despite the evil "blockade". Not only that, it's "world class" healthcare and education. But just like Potemkin villages set up the Nazis prior to World War 2, this is all a mirage. It doesn't matter what the true state of Cuban healthcare is as long as they can keep on having people believe the myth.
Make no mistake, there are some world class facilities in Cuba, like where fidel has been treated (by a Spanish doctor) since his health went south a year ago. The problem is that they are off limits to your run of the mill Cuban. But this is precisely the type of place that the government took Michael Moore for his faux documentary "Sicko".
That's what started this whole episode with Dr. Darsi Ferrer, therealcuba.com, ABC News and Fox News channel.
Since many of anti-castro sites and blogs took issue with Moore's portrayal of Cuban healthcare, ABC reached out to some of us. In particular they reached out to George Utset of therealcuba.com. They wanted to investigate whether Moore's claims were true or not. At the time many of our sites and blogs made an appeal to recent arrivals who could tell their stories about Cuban healthcare. We also asked for doctors who had recently arrived to share their experiences. For the first time the real Cuban healthcare situation was going to be looked at seriously by a "legitimate" news organization and it was going to be 20/20's John Stossel that was going to do it.
For weeks and months George worked tirelessly on the project. He contacted Dr. Ferrer Ramirez and to his credit Dr. Ferrer accepted the challenge of obtaining clandestine footage of Cuban health facilities. Wearing a hidden camera in his doctor's lab coat, Darsi entered and filmed some of the hospitals, clinics and pharmacies in Havana. I should pause to note that if he had been caught doing this he could have faced imprisonment or worse for an act of "treason against the Revolution" (he still can, as a matter of fact).
Dr. Ferrer gathered hours of unimpeachable material. He was willing to speak on camera as a Cuban healthcare professional with first-hand knowledge of the subject matter. He had patients and family members on camera talking about the desperate situation. The next big challenge was getting the video out of Cuba. Let's just put it this way, it was done very diplomatically.
So after risking his freedom and his life to obtain the evidence, ABC news began to reduce the scope of the investigation and the length of the segment. They wanted to go after Moore and the concept of socialized medicine more than expose the reality of Cuban healthcare. I don't really blame them. The American people, for the most part, don't really care about Cuba but they do care about themselves. And the news media these days reports on what people want to see, not what's important. Witness the wall to wall coverage of useless Hollywood types like Britney and Paris and Lindsay.
George explains the pressure under which Stossel and his bosses were working:
Stossel was the one who kept shortening it. He also didn't want to show the Darsi interview. The foreign desk put a lot of pressure saying that their bureau in Cuba, that as far as I'm concerned is worthless, was going to be closed if this piece aired. The producer was the only one who really wanted to tell the whole story and show all the material that she was able to get. But unfortunately the decision as to how much time to allow for the segment was up to Stossel and his bosses.
When the piece finally aired it was short 5-minute clip that was used to tease the broader investigative piece about socialized healthcare that focused on Canada and the UK. Almost none of the unprecedented footage taken by Dr. Darsi Ferrer made it into the piece. Even so, what did make the air was so offensive to the castro regime that as John Stossel stated on his weekly email to viewers:
[t]he Cuban government reacted swiftly. The Central Committee met to discuss the "case" and then called members of the ABC Cuban bureau in for questioning.
The thing was that the Cuban bureau had nothing to do with the footage and knew nothing about it.
In any case, the whole thing could have ended there but George was persistent, and smart. He had made copies of all the footage he had sent to ABC. And was now trying to find outlets to air it. Local TV was a no-brainer and soon the local show A Mano Limpia hosted by the Dominican journalist Oscar Haza, had agreed to spend an entire hour showing and analyzing the video. But all of us who had been in contact with George during the entire process felt that this needed a wider audience. And luckily Fox News Channel, that doesn't have a Havana or Cuba bureau, agreed to air it.
Again Hannity and Colmes focused on the domestic implications and the debate on socialized medicine. But George's purpose was only to show raw footage of real conditions in Cuba's hospitals, clinics and pharmacies.
While I thank Fox News and Hannity and Colmes I think they missed a big angle to this story which is why was ABC news so afraid to upset the regime in Cuba? Why did they forgo the opportunity to tell a story that nobody else is telling? What influence does the regime have over news gathering organizations with official bureaus in Cuba? How much self-censorship is going on to avoid being expelled from the country? Why is it so important to have a bureau in a country when you can't report what you find? Why was there such little coverage of the expulsion of Gary Marx (Chicago Tribune) and Stephen Gibbs (BBC) by both outlets?
Listen to the 1-hour interview we did with George Utset of therealcuba.com by clicking the image below. I think it's the best show we've ever done, it's certainly the most important.
Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at October 12, 2007 06:00 AM |
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Comments
Great post & pic. ABC should have half the guts Dr. Ferrer has.
Posted by: Claudia ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.babalublog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 11, 2007 11:56 PM
BIG KUDOS to George!
Posted by: Felix Ricardo at October 12, 2007 02:40 AM
I suppose if one's going to be a whore on a major scale, like the MSM, one has to embrace whoredom as perfectly fine and proper. Makes it much easier to operate. It's like: "Don't think about it, just keep turning tricks and collecting payment."
Posted by: asombra at October 12, 2007 10:25 AM
It occurs to me that now that the international media - as well as millions of viewers - know Dr. Ferrer was the individual who shot the videos used in the piece, the responsibility falls on us to maintain his notoriety in blogs etc, so that the regime in Havana can't harm him without raising an international uproar. This man is now in a very precarious situation, obviously.
Well done, George, well done. I can only hope that Dr. Ferrer has a guardian angel looking over him.
Posted by: CubaWatch at October 12, 2007 10:37 AM
Can you all imagine what would be happening if this exact same situation had involved apartheid-era South Africa? Dr. Ferrer, who happens to be black, would be an international celebrity, lionized by EVERYONE who was anyone, and the incident would become a MAJOR event that the MSM would latch onto and not let go.
Can you spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y? Sure can.
Posted by: asombra at October 12, 2007 12:38 PM
Among the countless tasks for a free Cuba is to document, denounce and condemn, explicitly and in detail, all the betrayals Cuba suffered at the hands of the democratic world, all its complicities with the murderers and oppressors, all its vile opportunism and monumental hypocrisy. We can't undo any of that, but the perpetrators should at least be confronted with the ugly truth and experience the contempt that they deserve.
Posted by: asombra at October 12, 2007 03:36 PM
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