If a tree falls in the forest…

I am sure all of you have heard the philosophical riddle that asks if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, would it make a sound. A similar type of philosophical riddle can be applied to one of the latest U.S. diplomatic cables dumped by Wikileaks that “exposes” the horrendous health care provided to regular Cubans on the island.

Cables spotlight health woes in Cuba

A U.S. diplomatic cable from Havana in 2008 noted the problems in Cuba’s public health system.

In one Cuban hospital, patients had to bring their own light bulbs. In another, the staff used “a primitive manual vacuum” on a woman who had miscarried. In others, Cuban patients pay bribes to obtain better treatment.

Those and other observations by an unidentified nurse assigned to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana were included in a dispatch sent by the mission in January 2008 and made public this month by WikiLeaks.

Titled “Cuban healthcare: Aquí Nada es Facil” — Nothing here is easy — the cable offers a withering assessment by the nurse, officially a Foreign Service Health Practitioner, or FSHP, who already had lived in Cuba for 2 ½ years.

The riddle would be: If a secret document with secret information is leaked, and no one who is not already aware of this information is around to read it, is it still a secret document with secret information?

2 thoughts on “If a tree falls in the forest…”

  1. Alberto,
    This is so excellent – these existential questions. So apt.
    So far a lot of the things being leaked have been good for our side. But notice that our Pravda media do not report the contents of the leaks that work against the prejudices of the left.

  2. Alberto,
    When I read the article this morning I noticed that Tamayo writes that the Cuban health care system became like this with the end of the Soviet subsidies. It was like this since as far back as I can remember. Since the day we set foot in this country in 1973 my mother has been sending medications and all kinds of medical supplies to Cuba. The most basic things like tylenol and aspirin.

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