DESPERATE FOR FOOD & AID HAITIANS BEGIN LOOTING & YOU CANT BLAME THEM!

For the people of Haiti shock was giving way to despair and rage Friday as decaying bodies choked the streets of Port-au-Prince and aid workers struggled to distribute dwindling food, water and medical supplies.
As aid continued to pour into the devastated island nation, Cuba granted the U.S. government permission to fly through restricted air space on medical evacuation flights.

The deal, which pushes aside decades of Cold War animosity between Washington and Havana, will cut a precious 90 minutes off the one-way flight from Guantanamo to Haiti.

The air-bridge from Cuba could help open the logistical bottlenecks in Port-au-Prince that caused Haitians to receive just a trickle of aid as they face a fourth day of the earthquake crisis. United Nations peacekeepers patrolling the capital said people's anger is rising because aid hasn't been distributed quickly.

"I don't think that a word has been invented for what is happening in Haiti," said Liony Batista, the Food For the Poor project manager in Port-au-Prince."It is total disaster."

"We need food. The people are suffering. My neighbors and friends are suffering," Sylvain Angerlotte, 22, said. "We don't have money. We don't have nothing to eat. We need pure water."

An estimated 300,000 people have been left homeless with one in 10 homes in the capital destroyed, the UN said on Friday.

The U.N. World Food Program reported that its warehouses in the Haitian capital had been looted and it didn't know how much of its pre-quake stockpile of 15,000 tons of food aid remained.

Haitian police "are not visible at all," because many had to deal with lost homes and family members, said UN Mission spokesman David Wimhurst.

More than 300 troops of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division arrived at the Port au Prince airport overnight and others have arrived in nearby waters on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen told ABC's "Good Morning America."

"We have much more support on the way. Our priority is getting relief out to the needy people," he said.

About 5,500 U.S. soldiers and Marines are expected to be in Haiti by Monday. Their efforts will include providing security, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

The first U.S. military units are coordinating relief efforts at the airport. But since the 7.0-magnitude quake struck Tuesday, global efforts to deal within the disaster have been hampered by a damaged seaport and an airport that turned away civilian aid planes for eight hours Thursday because of a lack of space and fuel.

Aid workers have been blocked by debris on inadequate roads and by survivors huddled in the open out for fear of re-entering unstable buildings.

Engineers from the U.N. mission have begun clearing some main roads, and law-and-order duties have fallen completely to the mission's 3,000 international troops and police.

"The physical destruction is so great that physically getting from point A to B with the supplies is not an easy task," WFP spokeswoman Emelia Casella said at a news conference in Geneva.

The WFP, which began organizing distribution centers for food and water Thursday, was preparing shipments of enough ready-to-eat meals to feed 2 million Haitians for a month.

From Europe, Asia and the Americas, more than 20 governments, the U.N. and private aid groups were sending planeloads of high-energy biscuits and other food, tons of water, tents, blankets, water-purification gear, heavy equipment for removing debris, helicopters and other transport.

Governments and government agencies have pledged about $400 million worth of aid, including $100 million from the United States. The Red Cross estimates 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed.

The toll could go much higher as the spectre of infectious disease spreads. Hundreds of bodies remained stacked outside the Port-au-Prince morgue.

Limbs of the dead protruded from the rubble of crushed schools and homes. A few workers were able to free people who had been trapped under the rubble for days, but others were using bulldozers to transport loads of corpses.

Small groups of dazed survivors buried the dead along the roads, dust-covered bodies were dragged down streets, toward hospitals, where weeping relatives waited to claim them.

Haitian President Rene Preval told The Miami Herald that over a 20-hour period government crews had removed 7,000 corpses from the streets and morgues and buried them in mass graves.

Countless dead remained unburied - some in piles.

Outside one pharmacy, the body of a woman was covered by a sheet, a small bundle atop her, a tiny foot poking from its covering.

The State Department confirmed the death of one American, career diplomat Victoria DeLong, a cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy who was killed when her home collapsed.

Spokesman P.J. Crowley said three other Americans were known to be missing and the embassy had made contact with about 1,000 U.S. citizens, a fraction of the estimated 45,000 in Haiti.

In New York, the state has set up a a computer registry to gather the names of New Yorkers in Haiti in an attempt to locate people who have not been accounted for and to locate them.

The registry link, which will go on line at noon Friday, is on the governor's Web site - www.ny.gov/governor. A hot line number, 1-888-769-7243, will be staffed from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends.

Gov. Paterson said the information will not be used for anything other than locating and identifying family and friends.