Aid comes from unlikely sources

HAVANA >> Nearly two weeks after a devastating tornado struck Havana, the worsthit neighborhoods are filled with government crews restoring power and phone service and starting repairs to decimated homes.

There’s also a far rarer sight: Hundreds of young people in designer T-shirts and jeans hauling black plastic bags full of clothes, food and water donated by private businesses, artists and other members of Cuba’s small but growing upper-middle class.

For the first time in communist Cuba, prosperous individuals and successful entrepreneurs have taken on an important role in disaster recovery, long a point of pride for a government that boasts of its organizational ability and focus on caring for the neediest.

“Why is it only the state and big institutions that can show up? Why not everyone?” asked Camila Gonzalez, a 19-year-old sociology student taking clothes, shoes and personal care items to the Cuban Art Factory, a privately run cultural complex and performance space.

On Monday, the Art Factory hired a dozen classic American-made convertibles, normally used to ferry around tourists, to take donations to the devastated Luyano neighborhood. Much of the private effort has been organized on Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media, thanks to the roughly 2 million Cubans who have signed up for mobile internet since the service became available last year. Cuba is one of the least-connected countries in the world, but that has been changing quickly since the government began providing home and cellphone connections.

Former President Raul Castro’s opening of the centrally planned economy to a limited amount of private enterprise, and more internet, “has changed the socio-economic landscape of the country for the better,” Gomez wrote.