Mount St Helens erupts

A French philosopher of the eighteenth century astonished the prevailing thought of his day by saying that nationality was not the thing that divided people so much as climate and the sort of work they could do in it. This doesn't sound very revolutionary to us until we move on to his conclusion – that the laws should be framed not for the whole nation but, especially in large countries, for the latitude that people live at and the physical conditions it imposes on them.

Well, if he'd been living today, Montesquieu would have taken sombre satisfaction from two events that have happened in two places five thousand miles apart, neither of which could possibly have happened in the other.

The United States, three thousand miles wide, lies between the parallels of 20 and 52 degrees north and if you draw a line across the continental mainland from the extreme south-east point to the extreme north-west, you would be linking Key West, Florida with the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington. At these extremes, this week, we have watched a natural drama and a predictable tragedy.

At just after half-past eight in the morning of Sunday, May 18, Mount St Helens, in the Cascade Mountains, which had been growling and spewing earlier this spring, exploded with a mile-high column of steam and pumice; no lava, but vast eruptions of volcanic ash. The first explosion sounded like a clap of thunder a hundred miles away and, since the prevailing wind is westerly, within hours this atmosphere of ash was drifting eastward and depositing itself on the towns and the crops in its path to the depth of seven inches. By the third day, the volcanic ash was darkening the skies and blanketing the ground downwind five hundred miles away. Ten people had died, over a hundred were missing from the slopes and valleys close by and 50,000 people were being warned by the United States Geological Survey to expect a monster flood if the outlet to a large lake on the north flank of the mountain got plugged up by rocks and ash and trees.

Meanwhile, the great, grey cloud drifted at forty miles an hour in a widening swathe that reached from Maine in the north-east to Georgia in the deep south. It was flying high above the usual low pressure systems and New York, having a day of heavy rain for a change after hot, muggy weather, never saw it as it passed on into the Atlantic. Although the scientists are not quite sure, they doubt that the falling ash will confront us with any hazards to health but the damage to crops and trees over about a quarter of the country is already cruel enough to help the nosedive of the recession.

Meanwhile, the lord and master of us all, one Jimmy Carter, sits in his white mansion in Washington DC, three thousand miles from Mount St Helens in the state of Washington, interpreting the laws of the nation to apply to wildly different catastrophes in places as far apart in climate and ways of life as Norway and Cuba. There is luckily one initiative, not a law, which the president has at his disposal that does not require the consent of Congress. It is his right to proclaim any part of the country a disaster area and so qualify it to receive federal aid. Last winter he did this, most notably for two other places at similar extremes.

Los Angeles county had a week of incessant rain and houses slid down the crumbly soil of the coast range. On the other coast, the state of Vermont, whose main source of income in winter is from skiing and skiers, had the mildest winter in forty years and lost over $20 million. It, too, was proclaimed a disaster area from having had too little precipitation as southern California from having had too much.

But, on the Saturday night before Mount St Helens blew up, there was a human explosion at the south-east extreme of the country that must have made the president feel relieved that a volcano, while very terrible, is not even a political headache.

Miami, Florida – which to all the world is a sun-drenched haven of bathing beauties, pastels, skyscraper hotels, golf, shuffleboard and stuffed alligator souvenirs – Miami blew up in the worst race riot since the late 1960s. The spark that ignited the charge was the verdict of an all-white jury in Tampa on the west coast of Florida setting free four Miami police officers charged with beating a black insurance man to death the week before Christmas. But I think only in annual almanacs of events will this verdict be put down as the prime cause; it was only the culmination of what Miami's large population of blacks regards as an intolerable series of frustrations and injustices.

Random reports of police brutality as fact or hearsay seem to have started it. Then a municipal official, the number one Miami black, was convicted on charges of corruption. Such indignities might have gone on galling the blacks for months but there is one that grew and grew visibly and physically overwhelmed them to the point that all they could do was scream and burn and loot and set off guns. And that was the sudden armada of refugee Cubans, variously known as 'the Hispanic invasion' or the 'freedom flotilla' who in one month have deposited nearly 70,000 humans on the shores of Key West and how that became an eruption is still something we can only guess at.

It was preceded, you may remember, by the bizarre news a couple of months ago that thousands of Cubans had stampeded the Peruvian consulate for exit visas. There was, too, a May Day rally in Havana to urge the arming of a people's militia in defiance of Castro's regular army, which is routinely trained by the Russians and pundits have speculated that the Cuban people, in spite of three billion dollars of annual aid from the Soviet Union, are tired of queues and shortages.

Whatever the train of grievances may be, the fact is that one day, a little more than a month ago, we woke up and read that Castro would allow 100,000 exiles, from Florida mostly, to return to Cuba for family visits. From his point of view, like the Hong Kong visitors to mainland China, they brought useful hard currency but from his people's point of view, they were like early Irish immigrants on family visits back from America. They brought visible evidence of smart clothes and new shoes, and an air of carefree prosperity. This could well have been the charge that set off the headlong exodus to Florida.

When the first boats came in, listing into Key West with their loads of hysterical Cubans, President Carter gave them a traditional greeting. We welcome them, he said, with open heart and open arms. They were yet one more regiment of the legions of the persecuted and the poor who had responded with trusting innocence to the rolling verse inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'.

This is, by now, almost a sacred tablet of American folk law, in spite of the long and well-documented record of millions who've found here no golden door or gold-paved streets, but sweat shops, slummy tenements and a grinding life. There were, however, enough millions of the most humble and degraded of other lands who, as we used to say, 'made out', who moved up beyond their gaudiest dreams to become prosperous in one way or another, to be elevated from the peasantry or the ghettoes into the professional world of doctors, engineers, lawyers, merchants, even judges. Enough to keep alight the strong belief that America was the only place on earth where a man and woman might begin a new and better life.

It used to take a decade or more for many of the old immigrants to go from naiveté to cynicism to wince at the bitter truth of an American who wrote, 'The Tsar beat them into submission with the secret police'. We took it out in 14-hour working days and tuberculosis.

Well, it appears that the cycle of disillusion for the Cubans has been drastically contracted. By the time 10,000 had arrived, and then 20 and then 40 and on and on, the government went into a flap and the new immigrants were being herded into schoolrooms and huge, makeshift camps and all the desperate, brave efforts of the Miami doctors and the city manager and the governor of Florida, could not begin to cope with the problems of feeding, sanitation and the care of the very sick. It was a shock to us to learn that there were, among them, people terminally ill.

Castro had given the fleeing Cubans a sneering farewell: 'Good riddance,' he said, 'to the trash and the criminals and the perverts' and Castro, it came out, had a literal point. He had opened up some prisons and the Carter administration discovered that among the poor, yearning to breathe free, were people seeking freedom from murder charges and from mental hospitals. Now the great mass, no question, are family folk who believe in the glorious prospect of a free life and a job and a house of their own but by only the most generous definition can they all be called 'political refugees'. Yet, that is or was, the administration's definition invoked in their favour as against the so-called 'economic exiles' of Haiti.

The administration has now re-defined the Cubans as 'exiles' so that they may escape the quota limits of the new refugee act which Congress passed only six weeks before the Cuban deluge. It is the deluge that finally outraged the blacks of Miami who see themselves swamped by newcomers to swell a Cuban population which has moved in on the blacks' jobs and which is already more than a third of the population of the city. The Miami blacks have rebelled exactly as the Harlem blacks did in the Sixties when waves of Puerto Rican immigrants began to outnumber the natives.

Last week, a young Cuban braced himself in a lobster boat against the slapping waves. He vomited twice. Coming up ashen but unbowed, he said to an American reporter, 'I am going to a great country where they give opportunity to all immigrants to find work to make a living and to walk the road they want.'

A brave sentiment that has provoked in the government a noble response. A response that, unfortunately, has led to chaos.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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