Maybe the truth isn’t out there after all (with update)

One of the latest stories coming from the Wikileaks cables has it that Michael Moore’s Sicko was banned in Cuba. It was banned, so the story goes, because it depicted the Cuban healthcare system so favorably that authorities feared showing the movie would provoke a backlash among a public well aware of the actual state of the system.

This is strange. All the references in Google news to the supposed banning of Sicko can be traced to a single piece, dated 6 or 8 Aug 2007, by a Cuban dissident, Dr. Darsi Ferrer. The piece does not in fact say that Sicko was banned. It says instead that “There is no doubt that the Cuban authorities will not allow the Cuban people the possibility of watching this documentary”. The relevant paragraph in the cable, which is dated 31 Jan 2008, looks like a paraphrase of Ferrer’s opening paragraph. So it is not independent testimony to the banning of the movie.

After trying to track down the truth in this matter, I am stymied. It’s worth remembering that the cables are no more trustworthy than the people who wrote them, and that those people have axes to grind too. That’s pretty clear in this case (remember that the FHSP who wrote this was hired or appointed by the Bush State Department).

That’s not to say that Moore didn’t misrepresent the condition of the Cuban health system, or that the cable doesn’t state the truth, but only that in this domain everything needs independent verification. Journalists generally are treating the cables as if they presented a behind-the-scenes unvarnished truth. We historians ought to know better. All our documents are merely evidence, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, for what happened. 

Update 19 December:

The Guardian has a followup story, still mostly in steno mode, in which Michael Moore’s response to the Wikileaks cable is paraphrased. The story casts as a he-said-she-said matter what is really a question of fact. It continues to report as fact statements from the cable even though the cable has been shown to be retailing propaganda on the question of the banning of Moore’s film.