Cuba, Climate & Environmental Disasters

Twenty years ago Hurricane Katrina was “probably the worst catastrophe” in modern U.S. history, even according to then-Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff. Since then massive wildfires, droughts, and flash floods have swept much of the world with tremendous and deadly consequences.

And more are sure to come – as in the unprecedentedly-powerful Hurricane Melissa that just ravaged Jamaica and Haiti before hitting Cuba. Meanwhile gross environmental disasters like the toxic derailment in Ohio, the 300-million gallon sludge-pond breach in Kentucky, and the 800+ killed by a heatwave in Chicago also rock us here at home.
While climate change is real –a direct product of blind and heedless capitalist production– evidence shows “natural disasters” are rooted in structural inequality and governmental disdain for those who aren’t wealthy.

How must and how are working people responding? Why did revolutionary-though-impoverished Cuba lose only 15 lives when Katrina hit it as a Force Five hurricane when over 1800 people died in New Orleans in a Force Three?

Is it too much to say this a life-or-death discussion? After all, we have only one planet.