NEWS

WIRES

OTHER

Private Groups Rally to Send Disaster-Relief Aid to Cuba

By Kathryn McConnell  

Connections among major U.S.-based humanitarian groups and humanitarian groups in Havana are helping to get relief assistance to Cubans who have endured a long and devastating 2008 hurricane season.

Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services (CRS), one of the groups licensed by the United States to send humanitarian aid to Cuba, has been providing hygiene kits, medical supplies, food and home repair materials to partner Caritas Cubana, which distributes the aid to the thousands of Cubans displaced from their homes by a series of hurricanes and tropical storms. Caritas Cubana draws on a countrywide network of 12,000 volunteers to help with distribution. CRS and Caritas have been partners in sending aid to Cubans in need since 1993.

CRS receives donations collected by Catholic churches and volunteer groups in the United States, such as the Daughters of Charity in Miami. Soon after hurricanes Gustav and Ike hit in succession in August and September, causing an estimated $5 billion in damage, Daughters of Charity volunteers worked around the clock to fill boxes with donated goods that CRS then shipped from Miami, according to CRS.

The latest storms to hit the Caribbean island country were Hurricane Paloma in early November and Tropical Storm Noel in late October. They dislocated hundreds of thousands more people.

By November 14, with the help of CRS, the Daughters of Charity had sent 21 shipping containers of food, medicine and hygiene supplies and other items. So far, more than $1 million in relief has been sent to the country, said CRS' Lynn Renner, who recently visited the Catholic nuns who run Daughters of Charity in Miami. Renner posted an account of the visit on the CRS Web site.

In total, CRS and Daughters of Charity plan to send more than 317,500 kilograms (700,000 pounds) of food and medicines and other relief supplies to the island. CRS is also sending to Cuba 5,000 roofing panels provided by the Friends of Caritas Cuba, according to Renner's Web site posting.

CRS also partners with Providence International Mission, Hope for a Healthier Humanity, the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Holy Eucharist, the Eucharistic Apostles of the Divine Mercy, the Park West Children's Fund, the Free Wheelchair Mission, the Friends of Caritas Cubana, the Cuban Children's Fund and the Archdiocese of Indianapolis to assist people in need in Cuba.

In addition, CRS has an annual budget for Cuban disaster relief and accepts private donations through its Web site, Renner told America.gov.

Over the years, CRS has delivered $27 million in medicine, medical supplies and food and clothing to vulnerable groups in Cuba, according to its Web site.

Like CRS, the Pan American Development Foundation, based in Washington, has U.S. permission to send humanitarian relief to Cuba. It also accepts donations for Cuban hurricane relief at its Web site. The foundation is an affiliate of the Organization of American States.

Through the foundation, in early October, Bacardi Limited donated $100,000 to provide emergency shelter, food and hygiene kits to people on the island where the company has its roots. Another group licensed to send aid to Cuba is Pittsburgh-based Global Links, which recovers surplus medical materials from U.S. hospitals.

Global Links sent six shipping containers to help Cuban hospitals recover from hurricane damage. Two of the containers were sponsored by the Pan American Health Organization in Washington and two by individual donors from the United States, Canada, England and Australia, the group said on its Web site.

Operation USA, a Los Angeles-based international disaster relief group, said it also is sending emergency assistance to Cuba, according to the group's November 9 press release. The organization is aiding Cuba's main pediatric hospitals.

Operation USA is planning a benefit concert November 29 in Santa Monica, California, to raise funds for Cuba, Haiti and the United States to recover from hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

In September, the United States offered to provide up to $5 million in disaster relief to Cubans affected by Gustav and Ike. Those storms caused more than 3 million people to be evacuated, according to CRS, and schools, hospitals, and water distribution and agricultural systems received severe blows. The offer was repeated four more times, but those offers have been declined by the Cuban government, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Henrietta Fore said in an October 31 press release.

The United States has pledged to provide an additional $3.5 million in response to the United Nations Plan of Action for meeting immediate and mid-term needs of the Cuban people. This is the U.S. government's fifth unconditional offer of aid to provide direct assistance to the Cuban people in the wake of the hurricanes.

"It is our sincere hope that with this fifth offer we may finally get much needed aid to those Cubans who are still suffering in the wake of the storms," Fore said.

The USAID press release ( http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2008/ps081031.html ) is on the agency's Web site.

More information on the Cuba work of Catholic Relief Services ( http://crs.org/newsroom/releases/release.cfm?ID=1555 ), Pan American Development Foundation ( http://www.panamericanrelief.org/ ), Global Links ( http://www.globallinks.org/news/recent_shipments/pdf/GL_shipment_late_october_2008.pdf) (PDF file) and Operation USA ( http://www.opusa.org/whoweare/pressreleases/paloma.html ) are on those organizations' Web sites.

Source: U.S. Department of State

x