CNN Uses Pro-Communist American To Tout Cuban Health Care

There’s something deeply wrong with journalism that scrutinizes and criticizes the institutions of free and successful nations, but produces puff pieces on the supposed achievements of totalitarian dictatorships. On Thursday, CNN aired a piece of communist party propaganda about how Cuba could serve as “a model for health care reform” in the United States, complete with an authoritative sound bite from an American medical expert, identified only as someone “who’s lived and worked in Cuba for decades.”

But the expert, Gail Reed, is a longtime admirer of the Cuban revolution, married to the Cuban official who served as ambassador to Grenada in the early 1980s when U.S. troops liberated the island from hard-line communists who had executed the leftist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. She’s also worked at Granma, Cuba’s official communist party newspaper.

Correspondent Morgan Neill also recited all of the standard tropes about how Cuban health care is the best in Latin America, is completely free, and “no one falls through the cracks.” While he acknowledged that “critics charged that conditions in Cuban hospitals are appalling and that Cubans had to pay bribes to get decent care,” nearly all of the August 6 report was positive.

Anchor Don Lemon teased: “Cuba as a model for health care reform? Well, we’ll see. It is a poor country. But it can boast about health care. A system that leads the way in Latin America. So, what are they doing right?” Neill walked through a modern clinic, “an idea of where the country wants to go, the future of its health care, all of it free of charge.”

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By Rich Noyes, Media Research Center