Seems like most every hurricane that approaches the US hits Cuba.
How does a poor country survive all that?
Do they know something about building "hurricane houses " that we don’t?
Or is it that they don’t whine as much as Americans and just rebuild?
They have a commitment to move their people out of harm’s way. This piece even has a bit of a negative “military commies force people out” twist to it - Og forbid anyone in the US ever point out anything positive about Cuba (and hey I do have problems with Castro too but credit where credit’s due.)
The fact of the matter is that a poor country of 11 million moves 2 million because it gives a flying crap about them & spends the resources to do it. It also helps that they don’t have a good chunk of their military & equipment occupying other countries right now.
We could also ask “Why is Havana’s infant mortality rate lower than a lot of American cities?” although on the surface it makes no sense given the available resources.
They don’t sweat the clean up.
I’ve heard that Hurricanes primarily wreck two types of buildings:
Tarpaper shacks of the very poor (Haiti)
Wooden McMansions of the quite rich (US)
Other buildings tend to be concrete, which are more hurricane resistant. (not to mention termite resistant)
no cite, just what i’ve heard.
Brian
Oy. Enough with the US bashing. As the OP points out, just about * every * hurricane hits Cuba. They’re a fact of life there. Flora killed 1000 people back in 1963, for example. So national preparedness makes sense. And, as the article points out, it’s a lot easier to declare martial law in Cuba and * make * everyone evacuate.
The U.S.? Well, take a look at a hurricane landfall prediction map sometime. It’s not like they can pin down landfall to even a few hundred miles until pretty much the last minute. We have umpteen thousand miles of coastline and umpteen million people living on that coast. You can’t evacuate all of them. And even if you could, our style of government pretty much allows people to say “Hey, I’m just gonna take my chances.” Doesn’t have anything to do with the government caring or not caring. The logistics are just too unwieldy. And you have the “boy who cried wolf” problem. If you evacuate people everytime a major storm threatens, eventually no one will leave.
There are large parts of Havana that resemble 1945 Berlin - derelict houses with collapsed roofs, huge chunks of facade falling into the street, no running water, electricity for the “home” provided by an extension cord… yet people live in those houses.
My point being that so many Cubans live in houses that would be condemned in the US that hurricanes don’t make their piles of rubble any less livable than they were before.
Of course, there are many middle-class Cubans. Just like most other Caribbean countries (Puerto Rico, for one), most middle- and upper-class houses are made out of concrete instead of wood. My ex-GF’s grandparents (who still live in Bayamon, PR) live in a house that would practically be considered a “bomb shelter” in the mainland US.
Is this GQ or GD?
Keep in mind that the residents of Cuba aren’t depending on someone thousands of miles away to rush to their aid. Everybody in Cuba is subject to hurricanes, so of course everyone gives a flying fuck about them.
When dealing with a disaster like a hurricane, a military-type response is often the best way to save the most lives. We have more impediments in the US to running the entire country like a military operation than in a totalitarian dictatorhsip like Cuba. If all you want to do is save lives, without the need to respoect individual freedom or civil rights, it’s a lot easier to save those lives. Similarly, there weren’t a lot of Islamic terror attacks in the old Soviet Union. Ever wonder why there are more now?
I never been to Cuba, but in places like Jamaica and the Bahamas a good percentage of houses are concrete. The beach house we stayed in Jamaica had a fully concrete first floor with only the upstair loft made from wood.
As 'Earl pointed out, a lot of the housing in Havana is atrocious. It is so dilapidated that there are over 300 building collapses a year. This is due to neglect of the Cuban government to provide adequate housing. Old, pre-revolution buildings are allowed to deteriorate, get water damage and eventually collapse. Yes, people do die in the collapses.
Cuba is a huge island, about 700 miles across. It’s not like many of the small islands in the Carribean where a hurricane will hit the entire island. Fortunately for Cuba, although it gets hit with hurricanes, Havana has been spared. If Havana took a direct hit many of the buildings would collapse, not so much by the wind but by the water.
That being said, with Cuba’s experience with hurricanes, they have some of the best knowledge and preparedness procedures for tracking and dealing with hurricanes.
You forgot to mention the poor white trash (who are upper class by Haitian standards) who live in aluminum boxes held together by bailing wire and duct tape, a building type which isn’t widespread in the Caribbean I think.
I don’t know about Cuba, but the Caribbean is home to many islands (including mine) who are regularly affected by hurricanes (in various degrees of devastation). Their methods of dealing may include (not all of them added or implemented, although they should):
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Building codes so that stuff is not constructed of shoddy materials, nor on areas prone to flooding. That means in many cases the buildings are made of concrete… they may flood (or not), they may get rained upon a lot, but the roof won’t fly away and the walls will stand. If the houses are made of wood, they’re supposed to follow guidelines to make them wind resistant. Look at New Orleans, many of those old-style houses were not badly damaged by the wind.
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Educating the public about hurricanes, how to track them, give them lists of the emergency food and things they need at the start of the hurricane season (and everybody knows when the season starts, ends, and gets a free map).
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What to do if the person stays in the house… finding the safer place, protecting windows and doors, protecting furniture, etc.
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Having, prior to the start of the season, pre-designated shelters that can be used for those that decide to evacuate their homes. These shelters will have food, water, first aids, cots, etc. in order to provide for the people for a few days.
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Telling people when the hurricane is approaching, which are the dangerous areas and telling them to get the hell out of there. If someone needs help getting out, someone in the community (be it neighborhood, town, district, national level) can go get them and take them to the closest designated shelter.
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Prior to the storm, government workers would try to clear the roads and areas surrounding electrical poles of vegetation, trees, branches that would seriously damage the power lines (for example, a dead falling tree close to a powerline).
This is a question: is part of the reason also that the hurricanes they get are usually weaker than those that reach the US. I recall seeing the maps of recent hurricanes and it seems the longer they travel over water the stronger they get. On the latest maps for katrina and Rita, they seemed to be only a strength 2 or 3 when they were around Cuba. It seems like this would be true for most hurricanes. Is it?
** Mod Note**
Crandolph. This is GQ. Keep the political snarkiness out of here.
samclem GQ moderator
One thing I noticed after last year’s hurricane season is that generally anything that would have gotten destroyed during the first hurricane would already be destroyed when the second hurricane comes around. In other words, everything on Cuba that could be destroyed by a hurricane has already been knocked down by previous hurricanes. The wind damage isn’t cumulative, for the most part.
The OP asks a question clearly comapring the hurricane responses of Cuba and the US. I don’t see a way around a factual response that there is a political will to evacuate people there and not here. If that’s ‘too political’ (even as making negative statements - ones I largely agree with by the way - about the Cuban government are not) maybe the whole thread should be in GD.
There are and have been plenty of countries with military dictatorships (or for that matter democracies) which don’t or didn’t provide for evacuations of their people from areas prone to natural disasters. The ability to move people owing to having a military in charge is one thing, but mobilizing that effort is something else altogether. That’s a question of political will, not simply logistical ability. That Cuba decides to do this as a priority is fact. Can they do it? That they do suggests they can. Do they have to do it? Not really. Nations leave portions of their populations to fend for themselves in times of natural disaster with alarming regularity.
I don’t see how one could factually argue that we don’t know that Florida, parts of the Southeast and the Gulf necessarily will be hit by hurricanes sooner or later. It’s a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ for all of those locations. Hurricanes are a “part of life” in parts of the US and there’s no factual case to be made that the US couldn’t logistically have a plan together to evacuate people from dangerously low-lying areas within a timeframe when landfall is certain to within the width of a few hundred miles or less. That regional preparedness doesn’t or wouldn’t make sense in the US is much more a matter of political opinion over fact than anything I stated.
The fact of the matter is that the “plan” for evacuating New Orleans (to cite the obvious example of difference with the Cuban approach) - which we’ve always known was below sea level and eventually in the path of a hurricane - was for government officials at various levels to tell residents to find their own ways out. No one can state as fact that the US isn’t providing the sort of assistance described by KarlGrenze for citizens, if not Cuban style evacuation of areas expected to be hit, because we lack the resources.
I’d submit that the ability of a poor country to move better than 15% of its population around in a limited space on the same amount of notice anyone else gets for a hurricane suggests that a much richer, larger country could relocate a much smaller population % temporarily if it wanted to plan to do so ahead of time.
That the US military presence abroad - specifically thousands of National Guard personnel from affected states - hampered rescue efforts in the aftermath of Katrina is the conclusion of at least one US government report. I therefore also submit that as fact and not opinion. That Cuba is not comparatively hampered by having troops normally assigned to duties such as aiding disaster victims being deployed in foreign wars is also a matter of fact and not opinion.
I added the example of infant mortality to illustrate that frequently the deciding factor in the difference between what services citizens in different countries receive is in what government priorties are and not solely what available resources are. That statement seems hard to argue against as fact. I apologize if the use of that particular example is too political for GQ.
Finally, the assertion that people can’t be evacuated here because of our freedoms (vs. a military dictatorship) necessarily assumes that everyone in the US who doesn’t evacuate doesn’t want to and would refuse the help if offered. That is both factually incorrect and again at least as politically charged as anything I stated.
Crandolph. You were the first responder to the OP. You started this.
You gave a useful link for people to read. That was fine. Then you added a gratuitous political line.
. Again, suggesting Cuba cares about their citizens and the US doesn’t belongs in another forum. I might have let this rant slide, if you hadn’t made it part of the whole.
As you indicated yourself, this was gratuitous.
So, in total, your post begged for others to come in and comment on politics.
I’m not giving you a warning. I’m just saying try to remember which forum you’re in.