The New York Times - 12.09.2019

A4 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

N

NASSAU, Bahamas — About
2,500 people have been reported
missing in the Bahamas in the
wake of Hurricane Dorian, but the
names have yet to be checked
against those who evacuated or
sought shelter, the government
said Wednesday.
The number of confirmed dead
from the storm remained at 50 on
Wednesday, a figure that govern-
ment officials say is certain to rise.
The Bahamas Defense Forces be-
gan posting pictures on social me-
dia this week of soldiers in hazard-
ous material suits collecting mud-
died corpses and dropping them
into pickup trucks.
Dorian, a Category 5 hurricane,
toppled thousands of homes on
the Abacos Islands last week and
flooded more on Grand Bahama,
leaving large swaths of both
nearly uninhabitable.
“No living Bahamian has ever
seen anything like this in their life-
time,” Prime Minister Hubert
Minnis said in a televised address
Wednesday night, “but as horrible
and vicious as Hurricane Dorian

was, the bravery and resilience of

the Bahamian people is even more

powerful.”

Still, Mr. Minnis acknowledged

public frustration with recovery

efforts, and said his government

was “aggressively shredding the

red tape” to improve its response.

Its efforts to quantify the num-

ber of missing have been ham-

pered by the many directions in

which people fled. Some 2,

people are in government-run

shelters in Nassau. At least 4,

Bahamians had left the islands

and entered the United States by

Monday, American immigration

authorities said.

A database with the names of

the missing, those sheltered and

those who evacuated is being built

to make for more effective cross-

checking, said Carl Smith, a

spokesman for the Bahamian Na-

tional Emergency Management

Agency.

“As we are able to cross-refer-

ence our data sets, we will be able

to inform family members and re-

unite survivors with loved ones,”

Mr. Smith said.

McAdrian Farrington, whose 5-

year-old son and namesake went

missing after a storm surge at his

Murphy Town home in the Abacos

Islands, said he feared that au-

thorities would never find all of

the missing.

“There’s a lot of people missing,

not just my son,” he said in an in-

terview last week.

He did not criticize the govern-

ment for its efforts, but said he be-

lieved it was too big a job for the

Bahamas.

“You can’t just be looking in Ab-

aco,” he said. “They’ve got to get

boats and check the water. Get to

the ocean.”

Government officials also had a

fresh eye on an oil spill on the east-

ern end of Grand Bahama. Last

week, a Norwegian oil company,

Equinor, said that Dorian had

blown the tops off several storage

tanks on Grand Bahama and that

oil had seeped out on site.

But on Wednesday the com-

pany disclosed that oil had been

spotted in open waters and along

the coast some 50 miles north of

its hurricane-damaged terminal.

It said it was investigating the ori-

gin of that oil.

Equinor was also determining

the extent of the spill, said Erik

Haaland, a spokesman. “We now

have 76 people at the site ensuring

the safety and responding to the

spill,” he said. “Additional re-

sources are en route.”

The company disclosed the oil

sighting near the bottom of a news

release highlighting its $1 million

donation to hurricane relief ef-

forts.

Joseph Darville, an envi-

ronmental activist with a group

called Save the Bays, visited the

spill on Tuesday and said he was

alarmed to find oil about a mile

and a half from the company’s

storage terminal. The facility ap-

peared to have been stained with

oil that, with the storm surge, had

reached 30 feet high, he said.

“We are expecting another

powerful storm — tons and tons of

rain,” said Mr. Darville. “All of this

going to be washed into the water

table.”

Carl Bethel, the attorney gen-

eral, told reporters that the com-

pany had taken too long to re-

spond to the spill.

“We think that it’s been a little

too much of a delay,” he told The

Nassau Guardian. “We would ap-

preciate some speedy action on

that issue, and anything else after

that we’ll figure it out.”

Equinor said it had hired two

crews from Louisiana to begin

containment. One arrived Tues-

day night and the second was

scheduled to arrive Thursday, the

company said. Another 225

Equinor employees are involved

in the response, it said.

The Bahamian minister of the

environment, Romauld Ferreira,

said the government would take

care of the spill once the top pri-

ority — taking care of its people —

was secured.

“After lives have been settled

and restored,” he said, “we need

the environment to be restored.”

A rescue team from Miami working in McLean’s Town, on Grand Bahama, over the weekend.

MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

2,500 Reported Missing

In Bahamas After Storm

By RACHEL KNOWLES

and FRANCES ROBLES

Rachel Knowles reported from
Nassau, and Frances Robles from
Miami.

IVRY-SUR-SEINE, France — Appro-
priately enough, it started with a count-
down — “Trois, deux, un, zéro!” — as
the onlookers on the outskirts of Paris
looked into the sky.
The liftoff on a recent Saturday was
surprisingly sluggish, as if the machine
rose from the earth only reluctantly.
But after gathering momentum, the
demolition crane grabbed a chunk of
the roof and brought down the first red
bricks of “Cité Gagarine,” the huge
housing project that once symbolized
the success of the French Communist
Party, and whose demise now conjured
something else.
Christine Deliège, who lived there for
32 years, took off her sunglasses and
touched the corners of her eyes, insist-
ing it was only the sun. Her husband,
Joel, rolled his eyes.
“It’s a new chapter,” she went on.
“We shouldn’t be stuck in the past.”
The same has been said of the
French Communist Party, the main
left-wing party in the country through
the 1970s. It once enjoyed the support
of more than 20 percent of the elector-
ate and acted as a kingmaker in many
elections.
It also once had a stranglehold on
dozens of working-class cities sur-
rounding Paris, an area known as the
Red Belt, where the architecture had a
tinge of socialism, the streets were
named “Lénine,” and the party organ,
L’Humanité, was delivered to residents’
doors.
Perhaps no community has been
more committed to the cause than
Ivry-sur-Seine, an eastern suburb of
Paris that has been governed by the
Communists since 1925. It is part of
Val-de-Marne, the last of France’s 101
departments to still be governed by
Communists.
Ivry was where the party built an
ambitious housing project in 1961 that
embodied its ideals for its working-
class supporters: a huge 14-story, T-
shaped red brick building with 382
modern apartments and subsidized
rents.
As a symbol of the party’s seemingly
boundless future, the building was
named Cité Gagarine, after the Soviet
cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man
in space. The building’s renown was
cemented after Mr. Gagarin paid a visit
in 1963, and residents threw rose petals
at him.
“It was so modern when we arrived,”
said Yvette Villefumade, 76, who moved
into Cité Gagarine in 1969.
Unlike older public housing, the
Gagarine apartments had private toi-
lets, small living rooms, bathtubs —
though not the prized spacious kitchens
that even newer buildings would even-
tually have.
“We called them ‘American
kitchens,’ ’’ said Ms. Villefumade,
whose husband, Daniel Hartmann,
lived on Lenin Street at the time.
France’s rapid economic growth drew
waves of workers into the factories
ringing Paris, creating an acute de-
mand for low-cost housing nearby. By
responding to working and living condi-
tions, the Communist Party built a
stronghold of loyal voters.
“The Cité became a showcase for the
French communist experience,” said
Emmanuel Bellanger, an expert on
urban history.
But the party began losing members
in the 1980s because of two develop-
ments that France has grappled with
for decades.

The first was overall deindustrializa-

tion, which closed factories in Ivry-sur-

Seine and the rest of the Red Belt.

The second was the retreat of laid-off

workers, who moved away from places

like Cité Gagarine, and the arrival of

immigrants, mostly from former

French colonies in Africa, who filled

their apartments.

Between 1980 and 2007, France’s

industrial work force shrank 36 per-

cent. Around the same period, the

immigrant population rose 1.5 million.

The Communist Party seemed para-

lyzed. Many of its traditional support-

ers would gravitate to the far right. And

its message failed to resonate with the

new arrivals.

“Communists clung to their tradi-

tional model of mobilization, which was

based on white workers,” said David

Gouard, a political scientist who has

researched the Red Belt.

Mehdy Belabbas, a Green Party

member who sits on Ivry-sur-Seine’s

City Council, said that as a young man

growing up in Cité Gagarine, he was

frustrated that communist activists of

North African origins like himself were

relegated to minor roles.

To Mr. Belabbas, 41, the rise and fall

of Cité Gagarine was a mirror of the

Communist Party’s.

“Both reached their peak in the 1960s

and 1970s,” he said, “and then declined

as they fell short of addressing people’s

needs.”

Sarah Misslin, 33, the head of Ivry-

sur-Seine’s Communist branch, ac-

knowledged that the party had been

“late to grasp social changes.”

“There were many missed opportuni-

ties,” she said.

Once a shining symbol of the Com-

munist Party, Cité Gagarine came to

represent its powerlessness to some of

its own residents.

An elevator that broke down would

take months to repair. Cité Gagarine’s

jobless rate rose to more than double

national unemployment; residents’

income was the lowest in Ivry-sur-

Seine. The police came often, respond-

ing to drug deals in the halls. In the last

years, the rat infestations were com-

mon.

Some old-timers, like Ms. Villefu-

made, felt they had lost their home. The

new people had different customs, she

said, accusing them of throwing food

from their windows.

“I’d find couscous on my windowsill,”

she said.

For Walid Bousoufi, 29, whose family

moved to Cité Gagarine in 2008, the

place felt like a dead end. As he and

three friends killed time near the hous-

ing project, they said they had felt

“crammed” and “abandoned” in Cité

Gagarine, or “Gag,” as they called it.

“There’s no future here,” Mr.

Bousoufi said.

The city agreed, deciding to demolish

Cité Gagarine and eventually replace it

with new housing.

“We reached a point of no return,”

said Deputy Mayor Romain Marchand,

a member of the Communist Party.

As demolition started on Cité Gaga-

rine, the city organized a full day of

events. Posters of the Soviet cosmo-

naut, waving a white gloved hand,

adorned poles in the city center.

As the demolition crane tore into Cité

Gagarine’s red brick, Romuald Des-

champs, 38, gazed up.

“Did they have to start there?” he

said. “That was my bedroom.”

His parents had moved into the cor-

ner apartment before his birth, he said,

and he had spent his entire life there,

leaving only a few months ago.

He couldn’t look away, growing silent,

then finally saying, “Time caught up

with us.”

At the “Tree of Memories,” people

decorated the branches with old photo-

graphs of Cité Gagarine, mostly black-

and-white shots from the 1960s, when

the housing project and the rest of the

Red Belt swelled with true believers.

But today, in some corners of Cité

Gagarine, things were not as they ap-

peared to be. Even a show of support

for the Communists proved illusory.

Among those commemorating the

end of Cité Gagarine was Gilles Blanc,

36, wearing a red T-shirt of Vietnam’s

Communist Party. A die-hard? A ray of

hope for the French communists cling-

ing to their last elected positions with

their shrinking and aging backers?

“I’m a pure capitalist,” Mr. Blanc

said, an entrepreneur developing edu-

cational software for foreign markets,

including Vietnam.

Irony?

“Totally!” he answered.

FRANCE DISPATCH

From Symbolizing a Nation’s Future to Being a Tale of the Past

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

A crowd gathered late last

month, left, to watch the dem-

olition, above, of Cité Gaga-

rine, a housing project in an

eastern suburb of Paris that

once symbolized the success of

the French Communist Party.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By CONSTANT MÉHEUT

and NORIMITSU ONISHI