Private sector taking relief role in Cuba
State gets competition in aid following tornado
HAVANA — Nearly two weeks after a devastating tornado struck Havana, the worst-hit neighborhoods are filled with government crews restoring power and phone service and starting repairs to decimated homes.
There’salsoafarrarersight:hundreds of young people in designer T-shirts and jeans hauling black plastic bags full of clothes, food and water donated by private businesses, artistsandothermembersofcuba’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.
“The organizational capacity and impact we’ve seen in recent days would have been unthinkable a decade ago,” journalist Sergio Alejandro Gomez noted in a blog post.
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.
Private aid started almost immediately after the extremely rare Category F4 tornado struck on the night of Jan. 27 with winds of 186 miles per hour, damaging 4,800 homes and completely destroying 500 others.
“We’ve gotten aid from everyone, the government, artists, foreigners,” said Ivis Rivero, whose home partially collapsed in the city’s Luyano neighborhood.