Wind, rain and death: simple planning could have saved lives in New Orleans. It's a lesson Latin America can't ignore.

As the U.S. administration prepares to improve its response for the next natural disaster after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it might take a page from an unlikely source: Cuba.

In past years, Cuba has shown that it can keep fatalities at a minimum during a natural disaster. In 1998, Hurricane Georges killed 602, mostly in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but only four Cubans. Last year, Cuba recorded no deaths after Hurricane Ivan--itself a category five hurricane like Katrina--battered the island and destroyed 20,000 homes. Nearly 1.9 million of the island nation's 11.2 million people were evacuated before Ivan struck.

The key to Cuba's success is education. The Cuban government has made low-cost, preventative disaster preparedness part of the general curriculum from an early age, including annual two-day simulation exercises. Television and radio inform the public as the level of alert rises. Schools and hospitals are turned into shelters stocked with food, water, medicine and doctors. People know where to go and are evacuated with their pets and some valuables so they won't hesitate to leave their homes.

"The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions, but especially in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does," Salvano Briceno, director of the United Nations Strategy for Disaster Reduction told reporters at the time.

Planning is a necessity: Between 1970 and 2001, acts of God in Latin America have killed 246,569 people and caused US$69 billion in damage, according to the United Nations. That includes the 1970 earthquake in Peru that took 66,000 lives, the 1985 eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia that left 22,000 people dead and floods that killed as many as 50,000 in Venezuela in 1999.

Latin American governments would be wise to keep in mind the lessons Katrina taught the U.S. administration, as well as what was learned during a 1998 hurricane with the deceptively friendly name of Mitch, one that killed more than 10,000 Central Americans. In both cases, official neglect of the poor and environmental degradation exacerbated the effects of otherwise-survivable natural disasters.

New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the United States; 27% of its inhabitants live below the poverty line. The city's evacuation plan depended on its residents driving themselves to safety, but only one in five there own cars. Most left to face Katrina were either too poor or too disabled to get out. The Times-Picayune, New Orleans' major daily, several years ago wrote an extensive series of investigative stories about what would happen if levees broke during a major hurricane. History alone--Betsy in 1965, Camille in 1969, the Galveston, Texas disaster of 1900, where as many as 12,000 died--made graphically clear the risk along the low-lying Gulf Coast. City officials knew it; federal officials knew it. No one had a serious plan. To the degree they did, it wasn't implemented.

As in New Orleans, it was mostly poor Central Americans who died during Mitch or were forced to huddle in sports stadiums because they too had no place to go. And, as happened in the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua had heightened the area's vulnerability by messing with Mother Nature.

In Louisiana, wetlands around New Orleans which provide vital protection against flooding and tidal surges have been drained and built upon at a rate of 28,000 acres a year. In Central America, deforestation and cultivation of marginal lands contributed to mudslides when Mitch hit, while flooding was made worse by a lack of watershed management.

Central America has made significant strides in disaster mitigation since. And Latin American officials and nongovernmental organizations are working to end endemic corruption, improving building standards and disaster assistance for the poor. I believe we have seen the last of leaders such as Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza, who brazenly siphoned off international aid for himself and his cronies after a 1972 earthquake claimed 20,000 lives and left 300,000 homeless.

In the meantime, governments must invest in civil-defense programs along the Cuban model. Likewise, authorities must reduce nagging poverty and environmental destruction. Until they do, we all will remain highly vulnerable to natural disasters--no matter which side of the border one lives on.

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