The Cuban Counterpoint

Posted by Sonja Ebron

Any post-Katrina disaster response would have been better than the fiasco three years ago in New Orleans, but the response to Gustav was startling. I was happy to see a generally well-orchestrated mass evacuation of New Orleans last week as the hurricane approached. Mass transit in the city had never worked so well. And was I dreaming or were they flying people out of town? I agree with Kanye that “George Bush doesn’t like Black people,” and Katrina’s devastation caused no change of like minds or hearts. So give thanks that the Republican convention schedule motivated the government to get it right this time.

Cuba serves as a model for how to protect people from natural disasters. Hurricane Ike, projected to hit Houston hard this coming weekend, hit Cuba today with no reported loss of life, due to the evacuation of 900,000 to safer parts of the island. Cuba is in the eye of nearly every storm this time of year. As a result, the country’s leaders routinely and safely evacuate 1-2 million people each time a hurricane approaches, and they rarely lose anyone.

I’m reminded of the lessons from Cuba’s painful simulation of peak oil. Twenty years ago, with few resources of its own, Cuba relied heavily on oil imports from Russia. That all ended when the Soviet Union broke up in 1990; Cuba lost two-thirds of its energy supply. Can you imagine what would happen to the U.S., or any other country, under a similar scenario? For several years, Cuba suffered an almost total collapse of economic activity and its people nearly starved. The number of people living in Cuba declined for the first time in history. But the country rebounded and now has rates of everything from literacy to life expectancy that are the same or better than in the U.S., despite a gross domestic product 300 times smaller than we in the U.S. enjoy.

The factor that saves Cuba — from decades of U.S. embargo, a drastic loss of energy access, and frequent and ferocious hurricanes induced by global warming — is the power of its communities. The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil is a short documentary on how Cubans survived their “Special Period”. This ten-minute trailer is worth checking out:

How did this small country survive? Cuba drew on her decades-long investment in her people’s health and education. The documentary tells the story of Cuba’s reliance on the ingenuity of her people to grow urban gardens, to use their feet and bicycles more, to base health resources directly in neighborhoods, and to build out a low-tech renewable energy infrastructure that is the envy of Latin America. There are lessons here for those of us concerned about losing access to energy. Find more information and specific solutions for food, housing and transportation at CommunitySolution.org.