The resumption involves “priority boarding” of passengers with tickets booked for their original travel date.
LIMA, Peru – The National Bus Company in Cuba resumes its operations normally starting this Saturday at 11:50 PM, for the routes suspended as a result of the passage of Hurricane Melissa.
The information was published via Facebook by Eduardo Rodríguez Dávila, Minister of Transportation on the Island. According to the owner, the company will resume all its suspended routes even though on certain roads “additional security measures will have to be adopted because they remain declared with caution in circulation by the National Road Center and the National Transit Directorate.”
National Buses has established an order of priorities with the presumed objective of being able to guarantee transportation for all passengers with reservations, both for the days in which services were suspended, and for those who have reservations for the following days.
In that sense, the publication first mentions “priority boarding” for passengers with tickets reserved for the original date of their trip.
Secondly, passengers pending suspension days would be attended to: “once the travel of passengers with tickets for the corresponding date has been assured, and according to the available capacities of each unit.”
Rodríguez Dávila also clarified that the changes in the itineraries will be maintained until the roads are in optimal conditions for circulation.
In relation to the railway service, the Cuban Railway Union reported about the recovery process after the hurricane passed through eastern Cuba. From now on, it has been decided to keep the departures of the national passenger trains listed in the attached table canceled.
The minister assured that work is being done to eliminate existing interruptions on the roads located in the provinces of Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo.
“As progress is made in this task and the technical parameters of the infrastructure are restored, circulation can be restored to the province of Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo in that order,” he highlighted.
In addition, the note states that those passengers with reservations for these trains who do not wish to travel will be refunded 100% of the value of the ticket up to 15 days after the corresponding service is restored.
Other effects of Hurricane Melissa
Days after Hurricane Melissa passed through eastern Cuba, the Cuban regime presented preliminary figures on the magnitude of the disaster, in a session of the National Defense Council broadcast by the official program Round Table and headed by Miguel Díaz-Canel. The information arrives late and only partially, while the situation in the affected provinces reveals a scenario of deep devastation and abandonment.
Official data indicates that at least 76,789 homes were damaged. Within that total, more than 4,700 homes were reduced to rubble and another more than 12,000 homes completely lost their roofs. In addition, more than 47,000 homes are registered with partial damage, a severe blow in a region where the housing stock had already been deteriorated by decades of abandonment and lack of maintenance.
The loss of crops will directly affect the already poor diet of the population in the coming months. In the agricultural sector, the hurricane devastated hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops, including areas intended for the production of basic foods and coffee plantations in the middle of the season. The loss not only affects immediate local supply, but also compromises the region’s productive capacity.
Regarding the electrical system, official reports recognize severe damage to the infrastructure, with more than a thousand poles downed and at least 279 transformers damaged, which left numerous communities without service for days and, in some cases, completely isolated.
