Hurricane Katrina and the Cuban Evacuation Tony Christini   On Monday, August 29, 2005, hurricane Katrina obliterated the US Gulf Coast from Louisiana – through Mississippi and Alabama – to Florida, killing thousands, creating more than a million displaced people, and causing a flood that for current practical purposes totally destroyed New Orleans, along with much of the already limited credibility that top US officials (virtually all white and well off) clung to robotically and repulsively by way of an appalling epidemic of self-congratulation for wholly inadequate efforts of preparation and response. Many of these officials also engaged in degenerate implied finger-pointing at the victims – mainly black and working class or impoverished.   A year earlier in September of 2004, in Cuba, before massive hurricane Ivan reached shore, the impoverished country of Cuba evacuated 1.3 million people – a tenth of its total population – without a single loss of life.   The success of the Cuban evacuation and preparation has been buried, especially in the aftermath of Katrina - no doubt because of its large-scale criminal implications for US officials - federal officials, especially.   Not since the US Civil War nearly a century and a half earlier – decades before automobiles, airplanes, and electrical power were created – had an entire major American city been depopulated.   Much of the entire nation, and especially the populous and nearby state of Texas, agreed to take in many of the storm survivors who could not fend for themselves, though tens of thousands of survivors had not been evacuated, and were scarcely assisted, a week afterward and longer. Houston, a city of three million, initially agreed to shelter at least 25,000 people in the Astrodome alone, while over 50,000 displaced people were already staying (and paying) in area hotels. San Antonio, a city of a little over a million, also agreed to shelter at least 25,000 people as well at a former military base. Dallas, a city slightly less populated than San Antonio but far more wealthy, agreed to take in 25,000 evacuees at Reunion Arena too, as did other cities and town in Texas and across the south and some of the rest of the country as well. Chicago and Philadelphia and other cities offered to house and enroll displaced children in their schools (and federal law requires schools to enroll homeless children wherever they show up). But many children did not escape New Orleans at all, and many were still trapped there for days and days after the initial disaster.   And you could see the tip of the iceberg of the disaster right there on TV. On a few TV channels, that is. Most of the channels continued with regular programming.   And you could learn that the US could airdrop food (however ineffectively) into remote Afghanistan by the planeful (while simultaneously bombing the people into such desperation), but at least four days after the hurricane struck, the US could not manage to airdrop food to the convention center in downtown New Orleans – nor could? or would? the US truck in sufficient food and water and supplies, though TV crews had no trouble reaching the convention center. And the President of the United States did not even bother to order the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines to simply get there immediately in needed force in those four days – at the least. Why? Who knows? Maybe because mobilizing the military in this way might threaten the ability of the US to continue its regular troop rotations into occupied Iraq. Or maybe because it wasn’t the President’s rich white friends starving and dying of exposure in New Orleans, it was impoverished and working class blacks – always way low on the priority scale of official America, to say the least.   “Are they going to leave us here to die?”   “They’ve left us here to die.”   “Babies, children dead…families being forced to live like animals.”   “Please, just help us.”   “We haven’t heard anything.”   Days and nights and days and nights and days and nights…outside, dying on the interstates, in churches, in elementary schools, in hospitals and many other places in New Orleans with no official support or food or water – the vast majority impoverished or working class black Americans, children and elderly, pregnant and ill. Not possible to walk out. Where’s the Army? Where’s the National Guard? Disgusting top officials congratulating one another on the wonderful job they’re doing, claiming – insidiously – that they have all the resources and manpower they need but that there is a problem – for which they claim no responsibility – which is “distribution.”   Well, whose problem is “distribution”? Whose responsibility?   Is it the problem of the flooded and collapsed infrastructure that prevents “distribution,” even though enough “resources and manpower” – boats, planes, trucks and troops – would take care of that all throughout downtown? Is it the problem of the small minority of riotous residents, even though enough National Guard or regular forces would take care of that? Is it the problem of the trapped victim – living and dead – many of whom did not have the transportation or money – or trust in an untrustworthy, irresponsible, and incompetent government – to be able or willing to flee ahead of time? Is it the problem of the dead, whose city and state and national officials failed to protect them from the Gulf in the first place? who failed to protect New Orleans from catastrophe, and who knew years ahead of time of their failure to do so?   Oh, but the top officials say, we have everything we need, and we have done and are doing the best we can.   Disgusting is only too kind of a word to put to this.   Not possible to walk out. Danger of isolation, new flooding. No electricity for sixty miles. Hardship of any trek. Yet some tried. “Where are you going?” reporters asked one such mother with her child, walking through the city.   “I don’t know. Anywhere but here.”   “Something has to change today,” says a reporter. “Something concrete has to change today. Or these bodies are going to continue to pile up at the convention center.”   “Why not more food, more response, more boots on the ground to help?”   “The main goal is to restore order. Not rescue people.”   “Take my child. Save my child,” said the mother handing her person to a stranger on a bus while she herself was left behind.   “I had her hand but we were on the roof and then our house split in two. She said save the children.” And was washed away. “In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City…. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war…. By 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent…. A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken….” – Der Spiegel (Germany)   Some top officials and TV anchors insinuate repeatedly that it is the survivors’ own fault for not evacuating –   – despite the fact that a million or more people were asked to evacuate in less than a day’s time, on their own, using their own resources, however meager, and most did evacuate. And despite the pitiful fact that within four days after the storm, with all the resources of the United States of America, a mere few thousand members of the National Guard and other security forces managed themselves to arrive in the city.   “State and local governments are getting every resource they require” – the repeated claim by both Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Michael Brown, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.   The Coast Guard seem to be effective, rescuing 3,000 flood victims in the first few days of the disaster.   Local law enforcement also bravely rescues several thousand victims – but along with all other official agencies prove incapable of implementing pre-storm mandatory evacuation, and post-storm they also fail to maintain more than minimal communication, let alone contact, with city-wide victims.   “We’re seeing people who have run out of options.”   “We need milk for babies, food, water, diapers.”   “We need everything.”   “I’m overdue. For everything.”   Just after the televised Department of Homeland Security disaster task force news conference designed mainly, it seems, to give the impression that the situation is under control, the media report a literal “desperate SOS” from the Mayor of New Orleans – “We’re running out of supplies for 15 to 20 thousand people” – a more than understandable cry for help, and a feeble understatement, at best.   Blackhawk helicopters finally arrive bringing in the “wounded” to a staging area on a highway, to triage, a makeshift hospital set up by FEMA.   The Governor of Louisiana, lacking the necessary numbers of security officers on the ground in New Orleans, asks for uniformed officers of any variety – and gratefully accepts “sheriff’s deputies” from Michigan – the federal government of the richest most powerful nation on the face of the earth, a nation that spends as much on its armed forces as nearly all other nations in the world combined, is either unable or unwilling to provide security officers for the survivors in New Orleans. Sheriff’s deputies from Michigan go to help rescue tens of thousands of victims a thousand miles away – four days after the hurricane has struck.   Michael Brown: “FEMA is meeting all requests.”   Michael Chertoff: “We have all the resources and manpower we need.”   The President of the United States leaves his five week “working vacation” at his ranch in Texas, a week early – arrives in the nation’s capitol three days after the hurricane has struck, visits the disaster site five days after the initial strike.   “People dying in front of us. It’s sick.” – Reporters at the New Orleans convention center.   Flooded hospitals with little or no power essentially abandoned to their own efforts of survival of staff and patients, for days.   Cabinet Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff: “We have all the resources and manpower we need.”   Tens of thousands of people remained trapped in the city with little or no assistance or even contact.   FEMA Director Michael Brown: “FEMA is meeting all requests.”   “This is not my America. I am ashamed….”   Asked why it has taken two and a half days to evacuate the hospitals, FEMA’s Michael Brown says, “Lots of reasons…. The hospitals need time to prepare patients for transport….”   Two and a half days.   Meanwhile hospital doctors tell reporters, “We took the patients onto the roof but the helicopters never came.” Lacking electricity, they ventilate air into the lungs of critically ill patients by hand, for days.   It is Thursday night, day four after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans at dawn Monday. Top officials say:   “FEMA is meeting all requests.”   “We have all the resources and manpower we need.”   The top officials prove to be revolting.   But the catastrophic problems, for which no top officials take responsibility, go far beyond the top individuals, of course.   The problems are rooted deep in the bloodless, largely criminal system of rule itself.