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 News from Around the Americas | October 2005 
Hatches Battened Down in Cuba
 Mike Fuller - Prensa Latina
| | A Cuban boy looks at the Sabalo river in Sabalo. Six people were listed as killed and two as missing after Hurricane Wilma erased beaches and flooded luxury hotels up to the third floor in Mexico's famous Yucatan resorts. (AFP/Adalberto Roque) |
Havana - Cuba is more prepared than ever for the biggest hurricane to hit the Caribbean, with more than 760 attention centers on call, over half a million evacuated and all windows boarded up.
At 05:30 local time Sunday the empty streets were full of rejoicing frogs, hopping about in anticipation of this afternoon´s arrival of Wilma, the mother of all hurricanes.
In what has been an incredibly drawn out dance of death, she sallied along Cuba´s southern shore first, wiping out 13 people in Haiti.
Then she did a dreadful piruette in Mexico, taking at least six with her, and is currently eyeballing Cuba as her next partner.
But this country knows all the moves and is preparing a ballet of action to greet the monstrous weather phenomenon.
As of 20:00 local time Saturday, the National Defense Council reported that more than 760 attention centers had been activated, including seven on the provincial level, 93 municipal and more than 660 local command offices.
Some 630,000 people have been evacuated, including thousands of tourists and more than 160,000 students, with about 45,000 in 1,068 shelters, about half in schools. Over 420 thousand people have relocated to the homes of friends and families.
On the national level there are 510 emergency food elaboration centers, 4,500 different kinds of transportation in full swing, massive media efforts to keep the population informed and almost 86,000 people working on the hurricane preparation effort.
In Havana province 29 wind-powered water pumps have been dismantled, almost 7 thousand cubic meters of solid waste collected and 216 rapid response brigades have been created.
On Sunday morning there was a generous law enforcement presence and local agricultural workers unloaded their last bananas at rock-bottom prices under a sky that still had patches of blue. The plastic neighborhood dumpsters had even been emptied and collected in trucks to avoid becoming dangerous missiles.
The dance is about to begin. |
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