In the Cauto River basin, as in lots of the affected areas, the pictures reveal deep, long-accumulated poverty.
By Claudia Rafaela Ortiz Alba and Marcel Vila Marquez (La Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Santiago de Cuba at 3:10 a.m. on October 29, 2025, with most sustained winds of 195 km/h. Just hours earlier, its passage over Jamaica as a Category 5 storm had made it essentially the most highly effective storm to make landfall in 90 years, and the strongest cyclone of the Atlantic season that ends on November thirtieth.
Its path throughout Cuba minimize by means of a really mountainous space, bringing heavy rainfall and breaking precipitation data. This produced the worst potential situation: large runoff, flash floods, and large-scale inundations in locations like Río Cauto. Its harmful energy precipitated extreme and widespread injury throughout all japanese provinces, particularly in communities that have been already in extremely susceptible conditions.
In the times following Melissa, Cuban civil society, worldwide organizations, the private and non-private enterprise sectors, native authorities, communities, and the federal government have collaborated to handle, transport, and distribute humanitarian assist within the affected areas. And though we’re removed from the specified ranges of coordination and effectiveness, what we now have seen will not be a foul state of affairs—apart from Cuba’s shortage of sources, which additionally weakens the nation’s capability to reply to local weather crises and pure disasters.
An instance of this solidarity was the caravan “Río Cauto in Our Hands,” organized by residents of that locality who now dwell in Havana, with logistical help from the personal firm Pedro Carr, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), native authorities, and different unbiased actors. It represents an instance of multilateral collaboration amongst completely different events concerned in a metamorphosis course of—not a deep one, however one that provides speedy aid to affected communities.
The group delivered free meals and hygiene kits, together with milk, canned items, and bug repellent, together with important family home equipment and rechargeable lamps in three consejos populares of the Río Cauto municipality: Cauto del Paso, Grito de Yara, and Cauto Embarcadero. They additionally surveyed extra primary wants so they might return with extra assist within the coming weeks.
Though this isn’t an unfamiliar panorama, within the Cauto River basin—as in lots of affected areas—the pictures reveal deep, long-accumulated poverty, as if residing situations had remained unchanged for a century, regardless of transformation processes which have failed to ensure even a primary way of life for residents. Everyone repeats, rightly, that poverty existed lengthy earlier than Melissa, however its ferocity now’s overwhelming, as is the excessive vulnerability of those populations to disasters and ailments akin to arboviruses, that are spreading throughout the nation.
What might be finished? Humanitarian help will not be transformative sufficient to vary that actuality; it can not all the time accomplish that, neither is it all the time meant to. What comes subsequent?
Cauto del Paso is a flat, rural, impoverished neighborhood in the midst of the Cauto River basin, considerable in rivers and reservoirs. An outdated Ecured (Cuba’s on-line encyclopedia) entry notes somewhat greater than 500 inhabitants and “a housing inventory of 162 houses, in honest or poor situation.” The most up-to-date census, finished after Melissa by social staff to register donations, counted simply over 70 houses.
In Cauto del Paso there isn’t any household physician, no workplaces, no cultural or sports activities services, and now hardly any roads. In the recollections of its residents, solely Flora (1963) and Melissa (2025) have fully buried the place in water and dust, from the grass to the treetops. In each deluges, solely what may float survived.
In Grito de Yara there was no electrical energy or water for the reason that day earlier than Melissa hit. In two weeks, charcoal has been offered solely as soon as—at 1,000 pesos a sack—which lasts 4 or 5 days. In the mornings, the smoke from burning wooden and plastic used to organize breakfast is the alarm clock. Trucks arrive to ration and ship water on the sidewalks, 200 liters per household, to be hauled up stairs to second to fifth flooring in jugs and buckets. The neighborhood organizes itself as greatest it may.
Electricity has been a luxurious lengthy earlier than any of the cyclones this 12 months or final. Some neighbors, those that may, pretty divided items of land between their buildings to arrange rustic wood-burning stoves. Many are shared or lent. Others don’t thoughts the soot of their flats or the smoke-scented sheets on the clotheslines; their nonós (charcoal stoves) stay on balconies and stairwells. They can not or is not going to go downstairs. They are caregivers, or just too drained. Returning to the wood-fire stoves has been a brutal blow to autonomy, time, and high quality of life—particularly for girls, who in these environments proceed to bear almost all of the family burden.
In the evacuation heart arrange within the Ernesto Che Guevara semi-boarding college, within the Grito de Yara Consejo Popular, lots of of individuals from greater than 40 households have been residing collectively for over 20 days. Some have nowhere to return to after Melissa; for others, their houses are nonetheless uninhabitable. Some are complete collapses; in others, water nonetheless fills the inside.
Children, the aged, pregnant ladies, and folks with disabilities sleep on mats; everybody else—men and women—sleep on sheets on the ground. There, though not all the time on time and never with the standard required, they obtain meals, primary medical consideration, and a roof over their heads.
The place smells of urine and sweat, the consequence of a facility with few bogs and never designed to deal with so many individuals for thus many days. The adults look unhappy and irritated; the kids much less so—they’ve the schoolyard and its gear to play with.
Poverty is a fancy drawback with no boundaries and no single definition. Available data exhibits an increase in poverty and meals insecurity in Cuba that many discover alarming.
In distinction, official discourse hardly ever makes use of the phrases poverty or inequality, which carry higher political weight. It prefers euphemisms or behavioral phrases as an alternative of explicitly addressing the systemic nature of the issue.
Despite the shortage of knowledge to review or perceive poverty in Cuba, sociologist Mayra Espina, in an interview with the podcast La Sobremesa, utilizing basic-basket calculations by economist Omar Everleny, estimates that round 40–45% of Cubans dwell in poverty.
Another illustrative indicator is Cuba’s inclusion in UNICEF’s 2024 little one meals poverty report. This indicator measures “the shortcoming of younger kids to acquire and eat a nutritious and numerous weight-reduction plan throughout early childhood (the primary 5 years of life).” According to the report, the general prevalence of kid meals poverty in Cuba is 42%, a determine above the Latin American and Caribbean common of 38%. Of that 42%, 9% are in extreme meals poverty, that means they eat fewer than 2 of the 8 meals teams thought-about mandatory for wholesome childhood growth.
Poverty is sort of all the time accompanied by inequality. And though Cuba doesn’t have latest official information on inequality both, it’s simple to intuit—primarily based on collective expertise—the speedy deepening of the social hole, the results of the thirty-year financial, social, and later political disaster the nation goes by means of. This state of affairs has worsened with the 2021 reform (often known as the financial ordering), which additional decreased subsidies for the poorest and devalued the nationwide foreign money, inflicting state wages to lose a lot of their buying energy.
Faced with inequality—like poverty—Cuban society has tremendously suffered. These situations proceed to erode individuals’s sense of success and self-worth, threaten the nation’s long-term growth, and entrench the absence of alternatives and restricted entry to sources.
Having details about Cuba and comparative research is important to outline, measure, and perceive the scope and dimensions of poverty, inequality, and vulnerability— and to estimate the sources wanted to resolve or mitigate them. However, as researcher Tamarys L. Bahamonde notes, “it will be important (…) to do not forget that behind these numbers are human beings with aspirations, talents, and truncated lives (…). Statistics, although important, are devices that can’t be separated from the ethical and human complexity of sure issues.”
Neither dignity, nor democracy, nor freedom, nor growth exist within the summary. They are a household physician in Cauto del Paso, protected roads, comfy housing, meals, employment, water, developed agriculture, electrical energy… They are look after life, for the concepts of emancipation, and for happiness.
First printed in Spanish by Joven Cuba and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
