There are scant signs of help from the Haitian government during the ongoing crisis that has truly shook the world. The government appears scattered by the 7.0-magnitude earthquake Tuesday evening. The streets were filled with beleaguered residents milling about, left with no jobs, no instructions on what to do, and no place to buy food or to take the injured. Many said they felt totally alone and saw no evidence that relief was on the way, as their mournful pleas began to give way to anger.

“The government is mute,” a dismayed young Haitian said while he hurried past a body left on a traffic median. “They do nothing.”

The dead and injured were pushed through the streets in wheelbarrows. At the overwhelmed central hospital, anguished patients lay in a weedy parking lot on gurneys fashioned from wooden doors. Calls for help went unanswered, and no doctors were in sight.

Efforts to rescue, feed and treat ten thousands of Haitians trapped or injured in a devastating earthquake continued this morning, and the U.S. government said it had received permission from Cuba to fly through restricted air space on medical evacuation flights.

The authorization from the government of Cuba will cut 90 minutes from the flight from the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, the White House said.

In the meantime, as desperate Haitians used their hands and the few tools they had to try and retrieve the dead and rescue the living, an international armada of ships, aircraft and emergency crews struggled to ferry help from the airport outside the ravaged capital to the neighborhoods that were hardest hit.

“It’s a tremendous effort,” U.S.. Army Lt. Gen. Ken Keen stated in a televised interview. He said troops have heard few reports of problems with security or looting. “Our priority right now is getting rescue efforts, which are already on the ground, [to the victims] . . . and getting medical treatment and working with the government and international organizations to provide much needed relief aid.”

Even as a 90,000-ton American nuclear aircraft carrier was expected Friday, and transport planes arrived from as far away as China and Belgium, the first shipments of aid were just starting to reach the stunned people of this impoverished Caribbean nation.

Further hampering relief efforts, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily stopped all private and humanitarian flights from the United States to Haiti’s clogged airports for slightly more than five hours on Thursday, allowing only military planes, at the request of the Haitian government, a U.S. official said. Nine planes from the United States were already in the air when FAA issued the order, the official said. They could not land in Haiti.

Despite the arrival of some aid and rescue teams on Thursday, Port-au-Prince remained a haunted place of destruction, with many of its pastel buildings collapsed into death traps.

A Haitian Red Cross official said the quake may have killed as many as 50,000 people.