I am an admirer of a lot of Mr. Moore’s work, but he has misled people by saying on his blog that the diplomat who wrote the WikiLeaks cable lied about the banning of Sicko in Cuba. The cable was written in January 2008 and the film wasn’t shown on Cuban state television until April 2008, so it is quite possible that Cuban authorities had been planning to ban the film, but changed their minds later. There is no evidence either way. It is therefore wrong of Mr. Moore to call this a "made-up story."
But that’s not really the worst of it.
Please read the original cable in order to understand the whole story. Sicko is barely discussed in this document. Calling its author a liar suggests that everything else in the cable is a lie, also. But a lot of what is said in that cable about the Cuban healthcare system is liable to be true, and if it is true, it's very important for people to know about it.
The Awl had a piece about this story earlier in the week:
Sicko makes the (reasonable) point that if a poor third-world country can offer its citizens universal free health care, it is crazy that the United States can’t, not even in the case of those injured while helping in the 9/11 emergency. In the January 2008 cable in question, an American diplomat alleged that Cuban authorities were planning to ban the public showing of Sicko; they were afraid that regular Cubans would get all stroppy if they saw this movie, because the quality of care shown therein is so very not available to most Cubans. The appearance of this cable was greeted with joy by a number of the many right-wing journalists who detest Michael Moore; the story also appeared in The Guardian (mysteriously, only a cached copy is available (Update: And now gone; the cable itself is here)) and The Nation and on BoingBoing.
So then Moore went nuts on his blog because, he said, Sicko was shown on Cuban state television, and there were also several screenings around Cuba, apparently contradicting the cable’s claim that the film had been banned. He pointed out that anybody with an Internet connection could have checked these facts. He claimed all this as proof of "the Orwellian nature of how bureaucrats for the State spin their lies."
In his usual clever way, though, Moore left out a lot of important facts himself. For starters, Sicko wasn’t shown on Cuban state television until April 2008; the allegations may or may not have been true in January, when the cable was written. There’s no explicit reason to doubt that Cuban authorities initially intended to ban it, but by April had figured that there was more to be gained by showing an Oscar-nominated American film praising the Cuban health care system than there was to be lost through a display of the best Cuban medical facilities—facilities available only to Party mucky-mucks and foreigners, it is said (unless you have money for bribes).
What's more, Moore didn't much make notice but the subject cable isn’t really about Sicko at all; the movie is discussed in just one paragraph out of thirty-nine. The cable is really about the sad state of health care in Cuba, the lack of OTC medicines—even aspirin or Tylenol—the corruption among doctors, the terrible conditions in general. (I am Cuban, and these are things that anyone with the remotest ties to Cuban citizens hears about all the time. In case you want to know more about the Cuban medical system, Iván García writes a good blog that appears to honor every side soberly; his is the most credible analysis I have read.) Moore’s blog post mentions nothing and offers no opinion regarding the veracity or otherwise of the bulk of the information contained in the cable; this omission weakens his case enormously. But how many readers of Moore’s blog, and of Daily Kos, where Moore also posted his version of events, even bothered to read the original cable?
(from The Awl's "Wikileaks and the Dangers of Hubris", 12/20)
It's a pity that the real sufferings of Cubans, including the serious problems with their medical system, will go completely ignored because of the way this story was spun.