A Paradise Built in Hell The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters

In its 2004 report on Cuba's superb systems, Oxfam America concluded, “The Cubans have consistently built up their social capital to strengthen risk reduction, and have done this in times of rigorous economic scarcity. Their example raises the distinct possibility that life-line structures (concrete, practical measures to save lives) might ultimately depend more on the intangibles of relationship, training, and education” than on material wealth. Every disaster is to some degree a social disaster, and though a strong and united society cannot prevent disasters, it can plan and prepare for them, protect the vulnerable or make them less vulnerable, and make response and recovery work. New Orleans in the Katrina era was a battleground between the forces that made it strong and those that helped destroy it. The latter side has won many of the battles, but the war is not yet over.

The difference between citizens feeding themselves and each other and being given food according to a system involving tickets and outside administrators is the difference between independence and dependence, between mutual aid and charity. The providers and the needy had become two different groups, and there was no joy or solidarity in being handed food by people who required you to prove your right to it first.

The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.