Police Evacuations Are Credited for Low Death Toll From Powerful Hurricane

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MATANZAS, Cuba, Nov. 6 -- Bricks started falling on Yunieris Ramos Zamora as she lay in her bed. She put her hands over her head to protect herself as her
bedroom wall collapsed from the furious winds of Hurricane Michelle.

Ramos ran out into the living room, where her husband had been trying to hitch up a radio to a car battery to get news about the rising storm. She found him there,
buried up to his neck in debris from the wall and the now-missing roof, and she started digging with her hands.

"He told me to be careful because his legs hurt so much," said Ramos, 23, whose husband, Jorge Seferino Calvo, 39, later died after surgery.

Seferino was one of five people killed Sunday as the most powerful hurricane to hit Cuba in a half-century ripped across the island. The effects of Michelle were still
obvious today in this coastal sugar-producing city 50 miles east of Havana, which was among the worst-hit areas. Piles of debris -- branches, chairs, bricks, clothing
-- were piled along the narrow streets while teams of men shoveled them onto trailers pulled by large farm tractors.

Downed utility poles lay across the city. Families swept, tossed and rolled rocks, tree-limbs and smashed furniture out onto the street for pickup. Men with axes
whacked at an enormous tree that fell in a church yard. Officials from the national civil defense agency patrolled the streets in trucks with loudspeakers urging people
to help in the cleanup.

On Magdalena Street, crews of neighborhood youths worked with wheelbarrows and shovels on the roof of the building next to Seferino's house. They dumped the
debris two stories down onto the street, where it was loaded into huge plastic bags that once held rice from Vietnam.

Silvio Malagriano, 67, stood at the back of his apartment, where two pigs -- his dinners for Christmas and New Year's Eve -- slept in a pen that had a roof until
Sunday, when the same shower of bricks that killed Seferino came raining down. The pigs survived because Malagriano had moved them into his house, which he
said was strong enough to withstand a hurricane, unlike Seferino's place next door.

"The police told them to get out because everyone knew that place was in bad shape," he said.

The death toll in Cuba was relatively low largely because authorities evacuated more than 750,000 people from the most dangerous areas. Police cleared low-lying
areas near the sea, but they also conducted more precise, house-by-house evacuations.

By today, life had begun to get back to normal. Electricity was partially restored in Havana, although some parts of the city are expected to be without power for
days. Phone service in most of the city was back, but lines to many parts of the island were still down. Crews worked by hand to cut down broken trees along the
highway from Havana to Matanzas, where entire stands of trees were uprooted and had fallen over in perfect order, like neatly combed hairs.

Evacuees were largely back in their homes, and much of the talk was about damage to agriculture and livestock. Their importance to Cuban life was made clear by
the storm: Government officials noted that they had evacuated 741,000 animals along with the 750,000 people. One of the people who died, a 60-year-old man,
reportedly delayed his evacuation out of concern for his pigs and drowned in a storm surge.

President Fidel Castro, meeting with reporters after the storm, focused on damage to such crops as sugar and bananas. "That's because we know what comes next,"
said one weary Cuban, used to life on Cuba's ration-card food system. "No bananas for months, no pineapples for months."

Seferino's house, perhaps 100 years old, with green moss growing on its crumbling facade, was one of the weaker homes in Matanzas. But his wife and other family
members who live downstairs said they were confident that the house where they rode out other hurricanes, in 1996 and 1999, would make it again. Seferino,
Ramos and Seferino's 68-year-old mother, who recently had a leg amputated, ignored the police warnings and stayed put. They taped the windows, sealed the door
as tight as they could and waited.

"Everyone knew the house was in bad shape, but they felt they were safe there," said Emilio Silveira Roque, 47, Seferino's brother-in-law, standing in the gutted
remains of the house, as a chicken clucked in a cage and a pig grunted from a pen buried beneath several feet of debris.

"It's like pride," he said. "He said, 'This is my place. I know it will stand, and I'm going to stay.' "

Hundreds of thousands of other people heeded the police warnings without question. Nuris Amador and her husband, Jeris Barquin, live among a row of houses on
the edge of Matanzas Bay, where huge ships slide by to load sugar at the docks. They evacuated to a friend's house farther inland.

"We trust the guys who know, and if they say it's going to be bad, we get out," said Amador, whose waterfront balcony was blown away.

                                               © 2001