• by Roberto Savio
• Monday, September 05, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Anyone who discusses international affairs with Americans quickly becomes aware of a fundamental change in syntax without which they find it impossible to converse: the subject of every sentence has to be the United States. If China, India, or Germany, for example, are the focus, the attention of the American interlocutor will waver -unless, perhaps the subject is Israel. When you come across this phenomenon in the Caribbean during hurricane season, it is so pronounced as to seem a caricature, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

In this article, Savio writes that the local television signal in the Bahamas does not reach past the capital, Nassau, so here everyone watches American TV and can follow the progress of the hurricanes on the Weather Channel. The hurricanes that lash the US pass first through Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Despite the fact that when the hurricanes reach this latitude they are always at the peak of their strength, the Weather Channel barely covers them at this point, mentioning them only to alert the US public to a potential danger and using developments in these countries as no more than a backdrop for the story. But when the path of a hurricane begins to shift towards the US, the situation changes completely. All channels immediately begin round-the-clock broadcasts, and the people in the Bahamas who were given no coverage and no warnings can watch non-stop updates on every minute development in the superpower to the North. One point never made is that Cuba is hit by far more and far more violent hurricanes than the US, and yet for years there has not been a single death in Cuba because of these storms (in contrast Irene caused 15 American casualties). The reason is that Cuba's system of warning and prevention is the most developed in the world.

No doubt everyone wishes that there would be no more hurricanes, even category one.

(*) Roberto Savio is founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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