There are two places in the Western Hemisphere which are almost guaranteed to be hit by a hurricane each year. Cuba, that slim, elongated island running roughly northwest to southeast, and Florida, the somewhat larger, spear-shaped state jabbing southwards towards it, lie athwart the western end of the Caribbean and the Atlantic, right in the path of most storms. This year so far is ranked as the seventh most active for tropical storms since 1950, and although Florida has been hit only once - by Tropical Storm Fay, the season is only half-way through. Another country which sometimes gets hit has suffered gravely this year, and of all, Haiti is the least able to withstand the fury these storms can unleash.

In less than a month, four storms struck from three sides. First, it was Fay, which raged in through its neighbour, the Dominican Republic, leaving the countryside there ravaged and four deaths, from flooding. The Dominican Republic has a thriving agricultural base and stretches of forest, so there is the normal vegetative cover to help mitigate the damage. In Haiti, the story is different. The country is so poor that its 10 million people have stripped away nearly all the forest cover to burn as fuel, leaving the terrain subject to serious flooding and scouring from torrential rains.

After Fay came Hanna, then Gustav from the south, and last week, Ike, which tore in from the Atlantic through the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas. As the waist-deep waters subsided, bodies were found by the dozen, and the actual total will never be known. Hundreds of thousands, who have the most basic living accommodation, were left homeless. In Cuba's case, Fay crossed through the province of Matanzas dumping heavy rain, and then just a few days ago two storms struck in the course of a week - Gustav, after drenching Jamaica, and Ike, which ran from one end of the island to the other before moving off into the Gulf of Mexico to gain strength and cause more trouble.

The head of Cuba's meteorological service, José Rubiera, says it's been a very unusual situation: "In all of Cuba's history, we have never had two hurricanes this close together." These violent natural manifestations have left widespread devastation in addition to the toll in human lives. Cuba's sugar, banana and tobacco crops have been severely affected, and in Haiti, where farming is largely of the subsistence variety, the desperately poor people will now have to rely on aid from abroad.

The experiences of the two countries have revealed a stark difference: while both have suffered similar devastation, Haiti has lost more than 350 lives by official estimate, while only four Cubans have died and just a few injured. The difference - which applies to a lesser extent to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic - is in the emergency preparation systems. Haiti has practically none, while Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have such systems, but these have a long way to go to catch up with Cuba's.

In 1963, Hurricane Flora ravaged Haiti and Cuba, leaving some 7,000 people dead. It spent four days in Cuba, where the Castro revolution was then only four years old, and the response was haphazard. As a result of that experience, the Cubans began building a proper disaster-response system.
But it was still weak in the area of forecasting, and during the 1970s and 80s, hurricane bulletins were described as coming from the "Instituto de Mentirologia", or Institute for the Study of Lies. It was a clever pun, since meterologia - the Spanish word for the study of weather - sounds very much like "mentirologia" (mentira means "lie").

After that the government increased the number of weather-reporting stations and invested in modern equipment, and switched to trained meteorologists instead of announcers to present forecasts on television. By 1999 the met service was predicting storms with an accuracy of 89 to 92 per cent, the same level as in the US and Europe. Last year, the Centre for International Policy, a Washington-based study group, brought together some Cuban and US hurricane specialists to share knowledge of how to deal with responding to hurricanes. In April of this year, the CIP organised a trip to Cuba for nine US specialists to hear directly from the people there how they respond to killer storms.

While the social and political systems of the two countries are quite different, the Americans still felt the Cubans had things to teach them. The most important is that the Cuban hurricane response system is based on saving lives above property. The Cubans also begin early, starting in elementary school with education about hurricanes and staging regular drills on just what to do. Another factor is that because everyone has experienced a storm, they take these things seriously.

Shelters are clearly demarcated and everyone knows where to go when an alert is proclaimed. Arrangements are made for people who have special needs, such as medicines, diets or physical aids. Emergency stockpiles of food and medical supplies are strategically placed in preparation for the hurricane season. After a storm, the government evaluates the damage and replaces or repairs the damage according to priority. The system doesn't always work as intended, but the promise of replacing lost items and the high survival rate helps Cubans to prepare psychologically for disasters.

In a disaster report in 2002, the International Federation of the Red Cross stated that "Cuba's success in saving lives through timely evacuation when Hurricane Michelle struck in November 2001 gives us a model of effective government-driven disaster preparedness." During the Ike experience, about 1.5 million people were moved to shelters or to the more secure homes of family and neighbours, and there were only four deaths. Taken against the estimated US$4-billion in physical damage, that is a remarkable achievement.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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