Someone remind me why Cuba is so terrible?

Amid all the self-congratulatory anti-Cuban propagandan emanating from Washington D.C. these days about Elian Gonzalez, and where he belongs, it's hard to take much of it very seriously.

None of the media blowhard apologists, despite all their supposed analysis of why Cuba is such a terrible place, face up honestly to two or three simple facts. But you can't really blame them; their blindness is a function of their indoctrination into the official party line of American elites.

• Where would you rather be born to poor parents: Washington D.C. or Havana?

  Havana's infant mortality rate for 1997 was about half of Washington D.C.'s.

• If you didn't know what your socio-economic level or your "race" was going to be, where would you rather live: American or Cuba?

  Cuba may not be a very rich country -- and the American blockade has basically insured that it can't be -- but if you didn't know where you'd end up, the only rational thing to choose would be Cuban citizenship. Sure, you might be Bill Gates, in America but the odds are that you'd end up making $6.25 an hour asking "would you like fries with that?"

• Where would you rather get sick?

  Cuba has universal health care, and average life expectancies that are nearly identical to American ones (ok: American women live on average about 6 months longer than Cuban women; other than that, it's a wash.) In America, there are literally tens of millions of people, including millions of children, who have no certain health care.

Ok, ok, I know what you're thinking: Cuba doesn't have Nikes or Pokemon or Microsoft Office.

Ok, so maybe consumer electronics and Celine Dion CDs and TV dinners really are more important to you than health care. That's fine. But doncha think that the blowhards on television who keep telling everyone that Cuba is an evil totalitarian nightmare should be telling us the whole truth?