I’m not going to suggest that I’d hold up the U.S. government as a model of efficiency nor suggest it always knows how to do things right, but I have to admit I did a double-take after seeing in the news an article about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and other public officials visiting Cuba for ideas on how to better respond to hurricanes.

Nagin told the Associated Press how after Katrina there wasn’t a clear line of authority, how the president and governor were going back and forth. “In Cuba, you don’t have that problem ... The government says ‘This is what we’re doing’ ... and it pretty much happens,” Nagin said.

Nagin and 15 U.S. city and state officials met with Cuban civil defense authorities on how Cuba’s military mobilizes during a disaster.

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“I think they do a much better job than we do on knowing their citizens at a very, very detailed level, block by block,” Nagin said.

Sure they do, because as the AP noted, in Cuba the Revolutionary Defense Committees on nearly every block keep tabs on the neighbors. The committee members help out in disasters but between disasters report behavior they consider subversive.

It’s amazing how cooperative people become at the end of a rifle or tip of a bayonet. Is there any doubt the Cuban government would not have had the same problems with looting and vandalism we saw in New Orleans, after Katrina?

The reported poverty of the people in Cuba is alarming. They live under a very strict dictatorship. Political disputes are settled by jail time or by the sudden, permanent, disappearance of one side of the dispute.

Nagin’s list of outrageous things he’s said is lengthy, but it’s still hard to believe he’d hold up Cuba’s government as an example of how we need to do things here, even during the threat of a hurricane.

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Writing for a newspaper is like having 20,000-plus proofreaders and fact-checkers. There are few facts that can get into the paper about which at least a few locals won’t be knowledgeable.

I am reminded of that after writing in Sweet Talk Tuesday about my efforts to write a story, while at LSU, about equine infectious anemia and how miniature horses were used in a research project related to the disease.

My memory suggested the disease was carried by mosquitoes but Glenn Stokes of Mosquito Control Contractors Inc., who certainly knows mosquitoes and other insects and such, called to say he thinks it is actually horseflies that are the carriers of this disease.

I wondered later if there were miniature horseflies that pestered miniature horses?

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New warning labels for booze bottles:

• Warning: Consumption of alcohol may lead you to thay shings like thish.

• Warning: Consumption of alcohol may cause you to tell the boss what you REALLY think while photocopying your butt at the office Christmas party.

• Warning: Consumption of alcohol may create the illusion that you are tougher, handsomer and smarter than some really, really, big guy named Psycho.

Will Chapman is publisher of The Daily Iberian.