First, some basic data, courtesy of Wikipedia. Cuba has a population of 11 million people, only some of whom were impacted by Irma (which sideswiped the northern coast of the island). Cuba's total area is 46,000 square miles, but judging roughly from the TV maps, I'll estimate that about 10,000 square miles were affected by the storm. Mr. Galinsky reports that 1,738,000 people were evacuated, which we can take as a rough estimate of the area's population. Cuba's GDP is about $87 billion. Assuming that GDP scales proportionally to population, the GDP of the affected region is about $14 billion. Irma hit Cuba on September 8th.
Greater Houston has a population of 6.5 million people living in about 10,000 square miles. The GDP of the metropolitan area is about $450 billion. In addition, Harvey badly damaged the Beaumont-Port Arthur region, along with bits of Louisiana, for which I haven't compiled data. Harvey pounded Houston for several days beginning on August 25th.
Mr. Galinsky writes about Cuba.
More than 1,738,000 people were evacuated in advance of the storm by Civil Defense committees, minimizing the loss of human life. The committees made sure shelters — from community centers to caves — were comfortable and adequately provisioned. Students went door to door to persuade and help anyone in a danger zone who was hesitating, to evacuate. Tens of thousands of electrical and construction workers moved into action as soon as the storm died down.By comparison, Mr. Williams describes Houston.
In Houston, where flooding levels were much worse, mounds of debris from about 126,000 damaged homes line the streets three weeks after Hurricane Harvey hit. Across Texas, the debris “could reach 200 million cubic yards — enough to fill up a football stadium almost 125 times,” reported Reuters. Tens of thousands still haven’t been able to return to their flood-ravaged homes. In many, sewage and other contaminants have left them permanently uninhabitable.Mr. Linbeck reports that there are 1.6 million housing units in Houston (that seems low to me, but I'll take his number). That means that 6.25% of Houston housing units were damaged, some of which were left uninhabitable.
Mr. Linbeck also informs us that 30,000 people stayed in shelters during the storm. Of course many other people hopped into the RV and left town on their own or went to stay with relatives, or made some other arrangement--I have read no estimates about how many. But let's suppose it was 250,000 people--I think that's a very high estimate. It implies that less than 5% of Houston's population was rendered homeless, however temporarily.
In contrast, the entire population of the Cuban region was evacuated--they got to sleep in caves, which we're assured were "comfortable." Wikipedia reports:
Widespread destruction of housing was reported in the provinces of Ciego de Ávila and Villa Clara. In the city of Santa Clara, 39 buildings collapsed. Overall, Irma is estimated to have caused at least $2.2 billion (2017 USD) in damage and at least 10 deaths across the country."Widespread" surely implies more than 6%, and given the sorry state of Cuban housing to begin with, it's probably a lot more than 6%. Electricity was knocked out to the entire region, but Mr. Galinsky assures us that "as of Sept. 16, 87% of the population had some electricity restored." Which, given that electricity in Cuba is hit or miss to begin with, I guess that's something.
Mr. Galinsky adds detail.
The challenges are formidable. In addition to the electrical grid, tens of thousands of homes were damaged — 24,000 in Camagüey province alone. Dozens of oil wells, sugar refineries and more than 100,000 acres of banana, sweet potato, grapefruit, oranges, sugar cane and other crops, as well as chicken coops and feed lots for pigs and cattle were hard hit.Wikipedia tells us that 74 people lost their lives to Harvey on the US Mainland, approximately 50 of whom lived in Houston. The ratio of deaths in Cuba vs. Houston is at least 0.20. The population ratio between the two is 0.26, or comparable. Further, the 10 deaths in Cuba is a minimum--so the ratios may in fact be even closer. There is no evidence that Cuba was better prepared to prevent deaths from the natural disaster than Houston. Nor did it do any worse, but at the cost of evacuating the entire population.
It's instructive to compare the ratios of monetary loss to GDP. For Cuba, from the data above, that number is $2.2 billion/$14 billion, or 0.16. A very high estimate of the damage to Houston is $180 billion, or about 0.4 fraction of GDP. Thus by this measure Harvey did more than twice as much damage to Houston as Irma did to Cuba.
There are a couple of ways to interpret this result. One is that Houston was just unprepared for a hurricane, which then ran rampant across the region. This does not strike me as credible.
The second is that Houston has more infrastructure. It's the petrochemical hub for North America, with lots of refineries and chemical plants. The media reported at length about the chemical explosions due to loss of power and loss of back-up power. Nothing like that happened in Cuba because Cuba has no petrochemical industry and no chemical plants. It's really hard to destroy something that doesn't exist.
No Cuban freeways got flooded either--because there aren't any Cuban freeways. Mr. Linbeck tells us that Houston freeways were built purposely to serve as detention ponds, so to prevent water from going into people's basements.
The ideologically pro-Castro Militant makes the best case it can for socialist virtues in a natural disaster. I don't think that case is very convincing, but that's not the bit that most offends me about their reportage.
Mr. Williams, who is usually a very careful reporter, makes the following claim.
Nowhere have government officials mobilized the forces to deal swiftly with this social crisis, destroying the lives of tens of thousands. At best they hope to get some paltry compensation by and by.This seems slanderously untrue. As The Militant often points out, the media is happy to blame President Trump for almost anything. The fact that there has been very little blame about the Harvey recovery (apart from Melania's shoes), indicates that relief efforts have gone as well as can be expected. Mr. Trump notwithstanding, local government gets more of the credit.
Put bluntly, even if I were poor, during a hurricane I'd much rather be living in Houston than in Havana. So much for socialism.
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