Cuba offered 1100 doctors for New Orleans; rejected
``Speaking on Cuban television tonight, Castro revealed that on Tuesday, while George Bush was still on vacation playing with his spiffy new guitar, and a day or two before the Secretary of State went shopping for shoes, Cuba contacted the State Department and offered no less than 1,100 doctors to assist in dealing with the crisis. Doctors who, unlike the hospital ship which has yet to leave its berth in Baltimore and isn't scheduled to be in New Orleans until next Saturday (!), could have been on site by Wednesday if the Cuban offer had been accepted.''
Cuba was able to evacuate around 1.3 million people (about one tenth (!) of its population) before hurricane Ivan last year -- and nobody died. Ivan was also a Category 5 storm. Unhelpfully, New Orleans reportedly distributed a DVD (yes, a DVD!) to "the poor" urging them to leave -- but not providing any such means (like some sort of transportation).
More on the Cuban offer from this Cuban website, which has published an address from Castro made later to the 1586 doctors who had volunteered to help, ``Cuba, a short distance away from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, was in a position to offer assistance to the American people. At that moment, the billions of dollars the United States could receive from countries all over the world would not have saved a single life in New Orleans and other critical areas where people were in mortal danger. Cuba would be completely powerless to help the crew of a spaceship or a nuclear submarine in distress, but it could offer the victims of hurricane Katrina, facing imminent death, substantial and crucial assistance. And this is what its been doing since Tuesday, August 30, at 12:45 pm, when the winds and downpours had barely ceased. We dont regret it in the least, even if Cuba was not mentioned in the long list of countries that offered their solidarity to the US people.''
``Knowing that I could rely on men and women like you, I took the liberty of reiterating our offer three days later, promising that in less than 12 hours the first 100 doctors, carrying the necessary medical resources in their backpacks, could be in Houston; that an additional 500 could be there 10 hours later and that, within the next 36 hours, 500 more, for a total of 1100, could join them to save at least one of the many lives at risk from such dramatic events.''
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``Today, more than 12 thousand young people from around the world, chiefly from Latin America and the Caribbean, are studying medicine in Cuba completely free of charge, and their numbers will continue to grow rapidly. Scores of young people from the United States study in the Latin American School of Medicine, whose doors have been opened, since the institutions inception, to students from that country.''
More: cubaweb.cu, CarribeanNetNews.com, CNN via ZNet, Google News search-pattern.