The Revelation of Hurricanes in the Camouflaged Caribbean

Abstract

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina started tracking out of the Caribbean, made first landfall in southern Florida, and of course devastated the city of New Orleans. Of all the Gulf States, Louisiana is the most connected by culture and history to the Caribbean, and New Orleans has often been regarded as a Caribbean city. But it took the costliest national disaster in the history of the United States to bring New Orleans into clear Caribbean focus. As Andrés Duany says, we see it now in retrospect, before its ruin, not as one of "the most haphazard, poorest, or misgoverned American cities, but rather [as] the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities."