Vanessa Bauza
News Columnist
 
 HAVANA · Ever the battle ready comandante, President Fidel Castro directs every detail of Cuba's latest crisis from behind a round table in a television studio.

He fields calls from Communist Party officials who offer meticulous briefings from far-flung towns devastated by the "invader."

This time the enemy is neither a brigade of CIA-backed troops nor clusters of counterrevolutionary insurgents hiding in the Cuban countryside.

The enemy is Hurricane Dennis, which rumbled over Cuba, killing 16 and inflicting $1.4 billion in damage. It is only the first hurricane of the season, but Castro is ready for a summer of combat, taking to the airwaves in hours-long televised addresses to rally, reassure and unify Cubans as he has done during every major event here over almost half a century.

"No one should forget that the behavior of our people [during Hurricane Dennis] is as it would be if another type of invader attacks our country," Castro said during a seven-hour television appearance last week praising Cubans' solidarity and discipline in the face of adversity. "We know what we have."

From the Bay of Pigs invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s to campaigns aimed at eradicating mosquitoes that spread dengue fever, Castro is a fixture in every "battle" waged. Hurricanes are no different.

Every year, Civil Defense officials prepare for hurricane season like a military exercise with a two-day training session, simulating evacuations and training community representatives on how to deal with natural disasters and implement emergency plans.

The practice pays off. Cuba's death count is generally far lower than that of neighboring Caribbean islands. Last year, after Hurricane Ivan left a trail of devastation from Grenada to the Cayman Islands, the United Nations singled out Cuba for praise, saying even developed nations could learn a thing or two from Cuba on how to reduce risk.

"The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does," Salvano Briceno, director of the U.N.'s International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction, said in a statement from Geneva last September.

Cuba's government-controlled media put their own spin on the situation: "Ivan couldn't go up against Fidel," read a headline in the daily Juventud Rebelde after Ivan veered into the Yucatan Channel, swiping Cuba only slightly and causing no deaths.

Hurricane preparation is more than a point of pride here. It is depicted as a victory for the revolution.

Last week Cuba's newspapers claimed Dennis' defeat in front-page stories packed with revolutionary zeal.

"The revolution is more solid and strong, it resisted this powerful hurricane and will know how to endure several others, and if Dennis had struck the capital directly we also would have resisted its blow," read the lead article in last Tuesday's edition of Granma, the Communist Party daily.

A headline in Juventud Rebelde, which appeals to a younger audience, was also infused with blustery bravado: "There is no hurricane that can stop this country, this revolution and this people," it read.

In Trabajadores, a weekly tabloid published by Cuba's workers union, columnist Eldis Reytor wrote about Cuba's hurricane shelters, quoting a woman who had been evacuated from her home.

"I'm alive because of Fidel, I feel good because of Fidel. Viva the revolution!" Reytor quoted the un-identified woman as saying.

Along Cuba's south coast, in provincial towns and villages pummeled by Dennis, many Cubans did express faith that Castro would come to their aid with building supplies and other materials, even though in some cases they have waited for those materials for years. Most have little choice but to wait for the government's help; one sack of cement costs about half of an average worker's monthly salary.

In the central town of Aguada, where government brigades had built a small community of bare concrete homes for residents who lost everything to Hurricane Michelle in 2001, several homes lost corrugated roofs.

Now, after Dennis, residents again waited for help.

"We have never been forsaken by the government," said retired farm worker Reinaldo Suarez, 69, who lost his roof. "The government protects the people and we are very grateful."

Aguada's Communist Party leader, Orlando Diaz, blamed First World consumption and pollution for global warming, pointedly adding that President Bush has not signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for timetables in reduction of greenhouse gases.

All other leaders of the world's wealthiest nations, known as the G-8, have signed the agreement. Some scientists believe global warming may be a contributing factor to more active hurricane seasons.

"If the developed world knew the damage they are doing the situation wouldn't be the way it is. Bush hasn't signed the Kyoto accord," Diaz said.

But if people in the countryside are showing characteristic patience in waiting for new building supplies and electricity to be restored, Cubans in Havana are less lenient.

Frustration is mounting due to daily, hours-long power outages that began even before Dennis struck.

Food spoils without refrigeration and sleepless nights, without even an electric fan to ease the summer swelter, take their toll.

Some people have reported seeing anti-government posters, a rarity in this tightly controlled society.

"People throw stones at the stores, at the electric company, the bodega," bakery worker Rolando Garcia said during a recent blackout. "Some people talk trash about the system we have here. I leave when that happens."

Vanessa Bauzá can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com

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