Cuba Rescues 250 Flood Victims From Wilma

10/24/2005

HAVANA (AP) - Scuba diving teams in inflatable rafts pulled nearly 250 people from their flooded homes early Monday after massive waves churned by Hurricane Wilma flooded the capital’s Malecon coastal highway and adjacent neighborhoods of old, crumbling buildings.

The communist-government’s Revolutionary Armed Forces were also using amphibious vehicles to rescue people whose homes were flooded by more than 3 feet of water when the ocean penetrated more than four large city blocks into Havana’s coast.

“We’re amazed,” resident Laura Gonzalez-Cueto said as she watched divers transporting small groups of people in the black inflatable rafts with outboard motors.

“Since early today, the water has come all the way up to Linea and Paseo,” said Gonzalez-Cueto, referring to a major thoroughfare four blocks from the coast.


The outer bands of Wilma also drenched western Cuba and flooded evacuated communities along the island’s southern coast after the hurricane clobbered Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The extent of damage in Cuba’s north was not immediately known.

Late Sunday, Cuban President Fidel Castro appeared on a television program to calm Cubans anticipating increased winds and flooding as Wilma passed overhead en route to southwestern Florida. He also offered Cuban doctors to Mexico to help the neighboring nation recover from the natural disaster.

Castro praised the island’s efficiency in hurricane preparation, saying that despite scarce resources, Cuba has become internationally recognized as “a model country that protects the lives of its citizens.”

Cuba prides itself on saving lives during hurricanes, and its civil defense plans have been held up by the United Nations as a model for other nations. Mandatory, widespread evacuations are common and face little resistance.

The government in recent days evacuated more than 625,000 people, particularly in the island’s west.

Guanimar, a small fishing village of brightly painted wooden houses due south of Havana, was under water Sunday, with floodwaters as high as 3 feet in some places. The community frequently floods during hurricanes and its several hundred residents were evacuated as a precaution.