Old fights keeping new aid from Cuba

Before it reached Texas, Hurricane Ike wreaked havoc in Haiti and Cuba. President Bush sent $20 million in assistance to Haiti. He is trying to send roughly $5 million in aid to Cuba.

But regardless of Fidel Castro's status, some things haven't changed.

Between Havana's distaste of accepting money from Washington, and Washington's wariness of doing anything that suggests it is easing its longtime refusal to do business with Havana, the assistance for Cuba is tied up in the last knots of the Cold War.

According to the Cuba Transition Project at the University of Miami, Hurricanes Ike and Gustav displaced more than 2 million Cubans. Citing United Nations figures, it said that the storms caused $3 billion to $4 billion in damage.

Haiti's needs too are overwhelming, the BBC reported:

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, has endured the onslaught of four tropical storms in a three-week period, causing more than 550 deaths.

The UN has appealed for more than $100m (£57m) in international aid to assist Haiti, where most people already lived on less than a dollar a day.

But, as the Miami Herald reported recently, "a diplomatic spat between Cuba and the United States mires relief efforts."

The United States readied a package worth $5 million, including $1.5 million that would go to nongovernmental aid organizations working in Cuba.

"This is an unprecedented offer from the American people. For the first time, the U.S. government is willing to provide this assistance either directly to those most affected or through Cuban Government relief services," said Henrietta Fore, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Perhaps it is.

But Cuba, the Washington Post reports today, is asking instead that the administration temporarily lift the trade embargo against Cuba "to permit the purchase on credit of construction materials to rebuild housing and other infrastructure destroyed by hurricanes Gustav and Ike."

It rejected the offer of direct aid.

The United States, said the Cuban Foreign Ministry, "tries to suggest that it is desperate to cooperate with Cuba and that we refuse."

It added, in a statement reported by the Miami Herald:

If they want to cooperate with the Cuban people, then we request allowing the sale to Cuba of indispensable materials, such as tarps for roofs and other items to repair homes and to reestablish the electrical network.

-- James Gerstenzang

Photo: Alejandro Ernesto / EPA

Comments

[VultureTX]

Cuba is sitll playing political games it seems. screwing their own people. If they want tarps and emergency supplies , they just have to call Canada and order it. Takes one extra day in shipping. Plus the credit system is already established.

[LatAm]

whether cuba can buy tarps from canda is irrelevant to whether it will accept a "gift" from a state whose policy, fixed in law, is to strangle its economy and cause all the damage it can. cuba is saying that it does not accept such hypocrisy, and that it prefers to ask only that it be allowed to buy on credit, rather than in cash and in advance, from the u.s. those restrictions were imposed by bush to impede trade with cuba and, again, make life as difficult as possible for cubans. it's the u.s that for almost 50 years has screwed the cubans in an effort to "make them scream."

Headline should read: "Lost in translation - Difference between dignity and arrogance"