"Granma (Cuba) - The natural disaster has deepened the precarious situation in the eastern part of the island. Those who lost everything are unsure how to rebuild their lives amid the various crises affecting them"
"The smell of death permeates Cauto el Paso. The stench emanating from the remains of horses, goats, cows, and pigs has overtaken this town in Granma province for the past two weeks. Located near the Cauto River, the most voluminous in Cuba, this waterway — far from living up to its name — overflowed its banks in the early hours of October 31, following the passage of the powerful Hurricane Melissa. The carcasses appear along the road at regular intervals, tangled in the thick mud left by the floods that submerged the area for several days. They are a stark reminder of the helplessness of the inhabitants of this eastern region of the island, so dependent on their animals, where the hurricane came to take almost everything and further disrupt their already precarious lives.
Around 1 a.m. on the last day of October, after the hurricane had already passed through the island and was continuing its journey across the Caribbean, some residents of Cauto el Paso noticed that the water was reaching levels they hadn’t seen in the last 50 years. They alerted one another, and a race against time began to protect their belongings, moving them to the upper floors of their houses and even onto the roofs. Everyone had expected the hurricane to damage their homes, to blow off some roofs, but no one had warned them of the possibility of flooding. With no other option, the residents of Río Cauto and Cauto Cristo scrambled to save their own lives and took shelter, waiting to be evacuated by Cuban civil defense workers.
According to the United Nations mission in Cuba, Hurricane Melissa affected more than 3.5 million people, damaged or destroyed 90,000 homes, and damaged around 100,000 hectares of crops. Unlike other Caribbean islands, such as Haiti and Jamaica, where the hurricane claimed dozens of lives, no casualties were reported as Cuban authorities — who are accustomed to dealing with these types of storms every hurricane season — had evacuated nearly a million residents from the east of the island. But just when things were already chaotic in the lives of Cubans, between rampant inflation, the high cost of living, the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, unsanitary conditions, and constant power outages, the cyclone arrived to stir things up even more."
Sergio Murguía reports for EL PAÍS November 22, 2025.
Advertisement 
