One of the best reasons for buying The Argus each weekend is the column by Jean Calder. Her latest contribution,

"Cruelty abroad - and at home" (September 10), referring to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, was no exception.

New Orleans is a city I remember with particular affection and I would like to endorse Jean's suggestion that the thousands of casualties were victims of the Bush government's criminal neglect rather than of nature.

New Orleans was one of the most impoverished cities in the USA. It was a city wracked by corruption, police brutality, racism, low-paying jobs, unemployment and high levels of violence against women.

More than two-thirds of its inhabitants were African American - many descendants of the slaves who built the city.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighbourhood hardest hit, more than 98 per cent were black.

Nothing shows the "social class" nature of this tragedy more clearly than the example of nearby Cuba in an almost identical situation.

Barely a month earlier, on July 14, Cuba was swept by Hurricane Dennis - like Katrina, a category four hurricane. Though impoverished by the US embargo and lacking the vast resources the US has at its disposal, the Cuban government was able to limit the death toll to 16 by smoothly relocating more than 1.5 million citizens. Compare this with the 500,000 displaced by Katrina on America's Gold Coast.

Surely the richest nation on Earth has the technical ability to act as nearby Cuba acted - but ability and will are two different things.

-Bob Potter, Hove