[Marxism] In evacuations, it's said, U.S. can learn from Cuba

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(It's been a month now and we continue seeing articles along
these lines. I hope readers will circulate them among friends
and other interested audiences.)
==============================================================

In evacuations, it's said, U.S. can learn from Cuba
By TOM PRECIOUS
News Albany Bureau
9/30/2005
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050930/1014956.asp       


Henry Louis Taylor Jr., UB urban planning expert, urges a look at
Third World methods.

ALBANY - The United States should turn to the lessons of Cuba and
other Third World nations to help avoid a repeat of the New Orleans
evacuation horrors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according
to an urban planning expert at the University at Buffalo.

"You wouldn't have seen that happen in Cuba," Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
said of the much-criticized efforts to evacuate New Orleans'
residents, especially those from low-income neighborhoods.

Taylor, a speaker at a UB-led conference Thursday on disaster issues
at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government near the
Capitol, said Cuba and other underdeveloped countries have built
effective and cheap evacuation systems that rely chiefly on
neighborhood groups to alert people and then get them to safety
during disasters.

In the United States, he said, a top-down system is in place, which
focuses efforts almost exclusively on police and fire agencies to
handle disaster work - a system that buckled in New Orleans, in part
because of failed communications and distrust of government authority
by many residents.

The head of UB's Center for Urban Studies, Taylor was in Havana in
July researching a book when Hurricane Dennis slammed into Cuba. In
two hours, he said, 100,000 people were evacuated from a susceptible
area of the island - thanks to a well-tested, government-run
communications system that saw everyone from President Fidel Castro
to local officials beaming specific evacuation details to residents,
and the choreographed scrambling by neighborhood groups created
decades ago after the Cuban revolution.

The result, he said, was that a poor nation that had to make do with
Cold War-era emergency equipment was better prepared to evacuate its
citizens than the United States was to evacuate the residents of New
Orleans. It is a lesson communities such as Buffalo need to learn, he
said, because high-tech gear and evacuation plans by city officials
will not keep another New Orleans from happening unless officials
embrace a new effort to include block groups and other community
organizations - as in Cuba today or in England during World War II.

Taylor said he hesitates to try to incorporate too many lessons from
countries with vastly different government systems into how the
United States should handle future man-made or natural disasters. But
if there is one thing a highly developed country such as the United
States can take from Third World nations such as Cuba, he said, it is
to set up networks of neighborhood leaders, who are trusted in a
community, to be directly involved with government officials when a
disaster strikes.

While acknowledging that most Third World nations have little or no
disaster planning, and often have to rely on the United Nations and
others for support, Taylor said, there are exceptions such as Cuba.

The State University of New York gathering here featured a few dozen
experts in various fields, from architecture and civil engineering to
education, trying to begin a new coordinated research effort within
SUNY involving homeland security and disaster planning and response.

e-mail: tprecious@xxxxxxxxxxxx



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