Mick Hartley

We've seen plenty of footage of Florida and parts of the Caribbean after hurricane Irma. Cuba not so much. There's a gallery at the Atlantic:

[Photo: Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty]

[Photo: Adalberto Roque / AFP / Getty]

[Photo: Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty]

[Photo: Adalberto Roque / AFP / Getty]

It looks, basically, like Cuba always does, but with more water.

Michael Totten, who went to Cuba recently, doesn't gold out much hope for a quick recovery:

If the Cuban government can’t manage to repair roofs as they collapse slowly, one at a time, over a period of decades, how on earth will it be able repair hundreds or even thousands of roofs that blow away or collapse on the same day?

Even if the government could repair the physical damage to its homes and cities in a reasonable amount of time, which it can’t, many of the people who lives in those homes and cities will still be deprived of the most basic possessions indefinitely. If your mattress was destroyed by floodwaters, what are you going to do? You can’t just go down to the mattress store. There are no mattress stores in Cuba. There are virtually no stores in Cuba that sell anything at all.

Aside from those who work in the tourist economy and are allowed to keep tips, everyone lives in a ration card and a Maximum Wage of 20 dollars a month. No one could possibly save enough money to buy a mattress (or anything else) even if such items were available, which they aren’t. I stayed in two different hotels in Havana, and the mattresses in both my rooms were as hard as cement. They almost certainly dated back to the Batista era before Castro took over. If the government can’t manage to replace ancient mattresses in the tourist economy, which is its cash cow, how on earth will it be able to replace thousands of mattresses destroyed by flood waters?

Hardly anyone will be able to replace much of anything that was lost, nevermind a whole house.

Repairing devastated cities like Houston and Key West will require a Herculean effort on the part of the American citizens, construction companies, insurance agencies, logistics professionals and government officials. Returning to the status quo ante in Cuba, however, without an extraordinary amount of foreign assistance, will be as impossible for the foreseeable future as terraforming the moon.

On the other hand the Guardian's increasingly deranged George Monbiot, in good biblical fashion, sees it all as the inevitable result of our hubris – A lesson from Hurricane Irma: capitalism can’t save the planet – it can only destroy it:

Well, we can test it out. Will it be socialist Cuba that recovers better from Irma – or will it be capitalist Florida? Place your bets.