AB: You write that because hurricanes have “no respect for international boundaries or cultural divisions, they offer excellent vantage points to examine the influences of policy, culture, and politics on results close in time.” Could you walk us through how that works?
SS: The bad 1928 storm that Puerto Ricans call the San Felipe hurricane struck there before proceeding to the Bahamas and Florida—first over Fort Lauderdale and then Lake Okeechobee in the center of the state. This was perhaps the worst hurricane Puerto Rico has suffered, killing hundreds of people and destroying the economy. When it struck the interior of Florida, the region was full of West Indian workers brought in to work sugarcane. The warning was insufficient and hundreds of people were drowned; the bodies floated into the Everglades for months afterward. The response in the two places differed considerably. In Florida it even differed between the coast and the inland areas where the foreign cane cutters had been brought in from Jamaica and the Bahamas.
In 1963, Hurricane Flora hit Haiti and the Dominican Republic and ripped those places apart. The Haitian government, under Duvalier, gave little attention to the problem and didn’t even announce the arrival of the storm because it didn’t want to scare away tourists. As a result, hundreds of people lost their lives. Then it struck Cuba, which had just gone through the Cuban Revolution and the Missile Crisis. Fidel Castro marshaled an enormous government response. Every resource was turned toward demonstrating to the people the efficiency of the revolution. And it worked. They had very little loss of life given the nature of the storm, and the recovery was much faster. It was a lesson to Fidel, and in a number of speeches later on he said he wanted to use the response to represent the spirit of Cuba all the time. So Cuba has become a model of how relatively poor countries can by preparation and planning prepare for natural disasters. The United Nations now uses the Cuban example.
It has its problems. Cuba doesn’t give you a choice of evacuating if you live near the coast when the storm comes. So it raises questions of a libertarian nature about free will and communal organization. But on the other hand, the effects in terms of loss of life and loss of property have been very positive. Cuba was badly hit by the hurricanes of 2017, but its recovery was much faster than Puerto Rico’s.
The point that’s been made by a number of sociologists is that this isn’t a matter of communism versus capitalism. Socialist Vietnam has a relatively poor record with natural disasters; capitalist Japan has a good record. It’s a matter of the government’s commitment to respond. What resources is it willing to bring to the crisis?