PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI. — Not even in the midst of this stressful situation have the Cubans lost their spark, and when I ask how it is possible that the 200-plus Cubans whom, at 4:53 p.m. today, January 12, were living here in this city managed to survive the deadly earthquake, some people tell me that it was divine intervention; others, with a half-smile, say it is aché (grace in the Afro-Cuban religion); others refer to good luck and how when "it’s your destiny, nothing changes that;" but most of them still can’t believe it….

The stories are fascinating. Each one is more enigmatic than the one before. When I think that I’ve heard the most spectacular account, somebody else comes along and blurts out, "But that’s nothing…" and once again I’m amazed. So then I find myself trying to find answers to the mystery of the blessing of not having lost any of my compatriots. There must be many answers, but mine, without question is this: what is done from the heart cannot be ill-remunerated; death cannot be the payment for so many lives and dreams that our people have restored in Haiti.

Now imagine that you’re taking a shower and the bathtub begins to shake. That was the sensation felt by Prof Raúl, who is now helping us to understand the Haitians; he repeats the names of streets over and over to us, finds us places to sleep and snacks to eat, and even suggests ideas for our articles, as if to demonstrate that however strong the earthquake was, it has not sapped his energy.

Raúl believes it’s a miracle that he’s alive. "I felt like the ground was moving, I tried to reach the bathroom door, but the shaking made it too hard to walk. When I finally made it, I couldn’t open it, it was stuck. They were scary seconds. I thought I’d never get out and was convinced that the bathroom would collapse with me inside it. When the shaking stopped, I got the door open, put my pants on and went outside with various compañeras to find some protection. The press says that the earthquake lasted one minute; for me, it was 24 hours."

Ariel Causa, the consular affairs attaché in our embassy here, can see the comic side of what he was doing when calamity struck: he was getting a haircut! He tells us that, between aftershock and aftershock they finished the job, it occurred to him to ask how he looked, and somebody sagely commented, "It looks like you got a haircut in the middle of an earthquake."

It was the worst moment to be out looking for bread, according to Riselda Zayas, a nurse from Camagüey. She tells that she’d finished work for the day and had gone out to buy bread for the next day’s breakfast at the nearest store, now in ruins. Her eyes brimming with tears, she says that she hadn’t taken three steps away from the market when it collapsed like a house of cards. What followed was a tight embrace with another Cuban woman in the middle of the street until the shaking stopped. They were unhurt!

But the most moving story was that of Idalmis Borrero, an intensive care doctor who was one of the first of the Cuban medical personnel to come to the aid of injured Haitians who flooded into the residence of the medical mission. At that moment, this woman, who looks delicate but is definitely very tough, was attending to another Cuban doctor who had recently had foot surgery, when the medications cabinet came crashing down where she had been standing seconds before. It is now known that it was that office that suffered the most structural damage.

"The patient I was attending to couldn’t stand on his foot. When the shaking began, we tried to get out of the building; we had go get through several hallways, and the shaking was so violent that we were thrown from one side to the other. We helped each other, I supported him and he supported me. That’s how we got out, and I put him in the middle of the patio so that no building would fall on top of him."

"Nothing happened to us; his wound wasn’t affected."

But that wasn’t all. After such a scare and with tremendous heroism, this Cuban woman began receiving dozens of Haitians, who were arriving, terrified, with their relatives in their arms. She and one other doctor were the only health personnel there at that moment of the disaster. During that night of terror, many received their medical care. Could anything have happened to this woman in the earthquake? Definitely not. There were too many lives to save.