On Thursday US State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet expressed that the United States government was willing to work with Cuba to address the needs of the Haitian people. http://fpc.state.gov/135240.htm
That night, FidelCastro published a "reflection" dealing with Haiti, and said that Cuba was ready to "cooperate with any other State." http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2010/enero/lun18/Reflections-16enero.html
Cuba then struck an agreement with the United States to send medical evacuation flights with victims from the Haiti earthquake through restricted Cuban airspace. Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman said this would reduce flight time to Miami by 90 minutes.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/cube-allows-american-flyovers-from-haiti/
But the Caribbean communities emergency aid mission to Haiti, comprising Heads of Government and leading technical officials, failed to secure permission on Friday to land at that devasted country’s aiport, now under the control of the United States. Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding told one reporter ’I appreciate the chaos and confusion at Haiti’s airport, where there is just one operational runway. But Haiti is a member of Caricom and we simply have to be facilitated and the truth is, there is hardly a functioning government in Haiti...’
Asked whether the difficuties encountered by the Caricom mission may be related to reports that US authorities were not anxious to facilitate landing of aircraft from Cuba and Venezuela, Prime Minister Golding said he could ’only hope that there is no truth to such immature thinking in the face of the horrific scale of Haiti’s tragedy...’
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=161583443
We hope so too as real solidarity is what is desperately needed now , not double dealing or simply saving a child today so as to ignore it when it dies next week. The Cubans have been providing free medical support since 1998 in Haiti and training hundreds of young students for free at the Latin American Medical School. The benefits were touched on in one of the few reports in our media on Cuba's internationalism http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/14/haiti-earthquake-us-cuba.
What we dont want is anything like the story in the Morning Star http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/85736 which raises fears that this is not about helping Haiti but occupying it - and "US closing in for the kill in Haiti" at http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/85676
