USA: Hurricane tips from Cuba

“Cuba manages hurricanes well,” told Russel L. Honoré, disaster preparedness specialist to the New York Times and added: "We could be learning from them.”

Hurricanes rarely cause casualties in Cuba. In fact,  a person is 15 times as likely to be killed by a hurricane in the United States as in Cuba.

“Cuba has an enormous amount of deteriorated buildings that can’t withstand natural disasters,” said Ricardo Mena, Head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction's Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean. He added that while a hospital, for example, might need rebuilding, “that’s very costly and they don’t have the resources to do it.” Yet, he and other experts stated that Cuba would have suffered more if not for its well-rehearsed storm preparation system.

Barbara Morita, a first responder from California said that after Hurricane Katrina, “so many people told me, ‘I wouldn’t be alive if my neighbor hadn’t come over.’ ” And she added, “Maybe more could have been saved if we were better prepared.”