At age 80 Hal Holbrook performed his “Mark Twain Tonight” again on Broadway in June and I was lucky enough to be able to attend. "The world I live in irritates me enormously," Holbrook told the St. Petersburg Times in his fiftieth year of appearing as Twain: "Doing the Twain show has become a way for me to express my feelings. It gives me the opportunity to take a look at what's going on and let loose on it."

The highlight of the show was an excerpt from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn entitled, “Huck Battles His Conscience.” The morality of the slave society within which Huck lived bound him to help maintain the slave holder’s property rights, but Huck saw Jim’s humanity and helped him to escape because, despite himself, he was able to see beyond the morality of the slave system to another way of looking at the world.

As Twain put it, in Huckleberry Finn “a sound heart and a deformed conscience” collided and the heart defeated a conscience shaped and warped by slavery. Twain amused readers but also challenged them again and again to critique the received wisdom of their day with their hearts and to reject all forms of slave-holding and domination whether of race or class or nation.

Katrina has been a wake-call for the American media to break free from what Twain called the “the silent lie” in which “you simply keep still and conceal the truth.” Hundreds of reporters used their hearts and told the stories of suffering of our fellow Americans even though the victims were poor black people who are usually ignored. The media told of the failures of the Bush Administration to prepare for and respond to Katrina.

Reporters also explored the background to the story and provided readers with context. We learned about the administration’s cutting of funds for the levees, the incompetent personnel heading up FEMA and other agencies, the unavailability of guard units stationed in Iraq , and the negative impact of the administration’s environmental policies on global warming and reducing the wetlands around New Orleans.

But the “silent lie” has not been entirely banished. In all the thousands of stories about Katrina, there are only a handful where reporters have examined the role of capitalism as a system in the government’s failure in Katrina and to consider how an existing socialist society in Cuba handles hurricanes. And that’s where Gerhard Schröeder fits into this story.

In the recent elections in Germany, Chancellor Schröeder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) received 34 percent of the votes, surprising observers by falling only one percentage point behind the Christian Democrats. What has been little noticed is that the left of center parties, the SPD, the Left Party, and the Greens together received a majority of votes and a majority of seats. Despite an expressed desire to continue as chancellor, Schröeder rejected out of hand working with the Left Party because it includes the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor party to the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany.

Despite détente, the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt in the 1970s, and the disappearance of both the Soviet Union and East Germany, the anti-Communist mindset lives on. Allying with the Left Party might mean getting some new ideas about tackling unemployment and strengthening instead of cutting social welfare programs but Gerhard can only hear the ghost of Joe McCarthy and his German imitators ringing in his ears.

Closer to home, it’s not only the ghost of Joe McCarthy but the right-wing Cuban American groups that keep “the silent lie” going. Instead of learning all it can from the Cuban example of effective preparation, evacuation, and recovery from hurricanes, instead of accepting Cuba’s offer to send 1,586 doctors and tons of medical supplies to aid Katrina victims, the Bush administration answers the Cuban offer with silence and McCarthyite rhetoric.

To their credit, major media outlets covered the Cuban offer and the failure of the U.S. to respond. MSNBC producer Mary Murray’s story (“Katrina aid from Cuba? No thanks, says U.S.”) noted that two members of Congress, José Serrano and Raúl Grijalva, have called on the secretary of state to accept the Cuban offer. But stories analyzing what we can learn from socialist Cuba are rare.

Just one year ago, MSNBC carried an AP wire story (“Cuba mostly spared Ivan’s wrath”) on the prevention of deaths and injuries from hurricane Ivan due to Cuba’s evacuation of nearly two million people prior to the hurricane. Noting Cuba’s extensive civil defense and “preparedness education” programs, the AP quoted Salvano Briceno, director of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction: “The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions, and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does.”

Since the Katrina disaster is the worst in our country’s history, it would make sense to focus far more attention today on the contrast between our response and that of the Cubans but one has to look hard to find such coverage. CNN recently ran a brief videoclip from its Havana correspondent Lucia Newman on Cuba’s systematic preparation to evacuate people in the path of hurricanes. Although the clip has disappeared from the network’s website, CNN’s student edition ran the clip and posted a transcript (“Lessons from Cuba”).

Despite negative language about “total . . . control” by the “communist state,” the CNN report makes clear that the Cuban government efficiently plans to protect its people and takes special care of the most vulnerable. “On every block, there's a person assigned to take a census on who is being evacuated to which shelter, with special attention paid to the elderly and pregnant women.” Police and army personnel prevent looting and “electricity is cut ahead of the hurricane to prevent electrocutions,” Newman reported.

On September 21, Democracy Now! published an interview with Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, highlighting the systemic issues involved in the divergent responses of the United States and Cuba to hurricanes (“Cuba's Number 2, Ricardo Alarcon, Blasts 'Neoliberal' Katrina Response.”) Alarcon contrasted the images on U.S. TV of those individuals who had cars escaping New Orleans on their own with the Cuban approach of “government responsibility at every level beginning from the head of state.” Cuban President Fidel Castro is on TV “explaining to the people, the details, the direction from where the winds are coming . . . and counseling people to be prepared.” Advance planning on the scale the Cubans practice it means one has to “change the priorities,” Alarcon commented. “You have to change the values in which the society is based. You have to spend resources, money, on that.”

The people of the United States and of Germany may not be ready to embrace a new social system but both countries could benefit from the wisdom of Hal Holbrook and of Mark Twain. Let’s drop “the silent lie,” “take a look at what's going on and let loose” and not be restrained by a “deformed conscience” into rejecting out of hand sensible ideas coming from those we have been taught to despise. Let’s look beyond the morality of the capitalist system which elevates the accumulation of privately-owned capital as the highest priority to another, humanistic way of looking at the world.