The ability of a society to respond to natural disasters is primarily a political question. Communism is the exact opposite of the hopeless self-serving mantras of modern capitalism. While Cuba has long ago given up socialism in favor of becoming the next vacation hot spot, the ideology and practices have hung on to some degree, both in the state’s priorities and the outlook of the people.
Cuba’s reaction to Hurricane Irma gives us a fading look at what has been lost as the communist movement has declined over the last 50 years as well as a small glimmer at what is possible in a society fully dedicated to serving the needs of the great masses of people.
Hurricane Response After the Socialist Revolution
Shortly after the socialist revolution in 1960, Cuba developed a sophisticated hurricane response system in the wake of Hurricane Flora, a 1963 storm that killed 1,750 people in Cuba. The system included standing evacuation plans for every household and frequent drills. The whole preparation and response to hurricanes was organized under a civil defense system that organized people throughout the island to participate in the readiness, evacuations and immediate response. The Civil defense system has hung on, at least for now, even as socialism has been abandoned by the Cuban rulers.
[T]hey save enormous numbers of lives by massive evacuations. … this time they evacuated a million people. And even though the infrastructure is poor and many of the houses are very poor, [the state’s] focus is on saving lives.
…[the civil defense organizations] have all the neighborhoods mapped. They know exactly who lives where. They know who the vulnerable people are, and they know who the elderly people are and where they live. And a couple of days before the hurricane hits, they evacuate them all. They start with those people. Pregnant women get put in hospitals. People with infirmities get also put in hospitals. Others get taken to either shelters or with family or friends who are living in more secure houses. But everybody in Cuba knows what they’re going to do if a hurricane hits.” (Democracy Now, 9/22).
Compare what happened in Cuba, where 10 lives were lost in one of the places hardest hit by Irma to the situation in Florida where 11 people died at a single site as a result of the failure of the nursing home administration and State authorities to evacuate the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills. After Hurricane Irma knocked out their power “residents …spent three days sweltering in stiflingly hot rooms despite the fact that a fully functioning and air-conditioned hospital is right across the street”(NBC 9/21).
Perhaps even more sickening than the complete abdication of responsibility by those in-charge of the care of the nursing home patients is how the profit system makes an honest evaluation of what went wrong in Hollywood Hills impossible to assess as the finger pointing has begun.
A critical issue—whether administrators from the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills in Broward County made distress calls for help to Gov. Rick Scott’s private cellphone — will probably not be cleared up soon. On Sunday, the Florida governor’s office revealed the four key voice mails from the center have been deleted…
The center’s administrators maintain the calls to Scott were seeking “immediate assistance.” Scott’s office, however, says the calls never indicated an emergency, and that the information was passed on to the appropriate state agencies. But now the voice mails are gone (Washington Post 9/25).