These snapshots spiral like a cyclone, blasting out of my photo archives. More than a handful of documentary photographs, they are like traces that I have collected with my camera in various regions of Cuba after the blows of some ferocious atmospheric phenomena.
Time and again the eviction of scenes like these, captured a few years ago, reappears.
This time, the wrath of nature appeared on the Island in the form of a category 3 out of 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. had by name Ian. It entered at dawn last Tuesday through the community of La Coloma, in Pinar del Río, crossed the main city and left first thing in the morning for the sea, through Puerto Esperanza, on the north coast of the westernmost province of the Cuban archipelago. . For five hours, the fury of the violent Ian dumped heavy rains, caused strong penetrations of the sea and whistled wind gusts of up to 208 km/h. His passage left material destruction and the most unfortunate: three fatalities.
Hurricanes are an intrinsic phenomenon of the geographical circumstances where the Cuban territory emerges. They are part of their history and existence.
“Indo-Cuban symbol” defined this fierce storms Don Fernando Ortiz, in the book The hurricane: its mythology and its symbolsa classic of social anthropology published in 1947, in Mexico, by the Fondo de Cultura Económica.
The Cuban ethnologist studied several of the beliefs about hurricanes in the indigenous cultures of Cuba, such as the Taínos and Siboneyes. The research establishes how art, myth and religion are socially intertwined in “relation to the most significant meteor of the Antilles: the surprising wind that becomes a hurricane, elevated to deity since ancient times”, can be read in a review from the book.
Ortiz details in his text that “the hurricane is a meteor with a rotating function, it is precisely a cyclone as scientists have written with a Greek root, due to the circular or swirling development of the phenomenon. From there we can deduce the symbolism of the helicoid ideogram of the Indo-Cubans and its hypothetical relationship with the god Hurricane. This is based on the fact that said god, like that of whirlpools, winds and storms in general, has been represented throughout the world with a revolving symbol, and by greater schematic abstraction, as a spiral. In the dynamic symbolism of the wind several elements had to be accepted, actually or apparently of a revolving character; such were the centripetal movement of the eddies, the sleeves and, the typhoons, in their diversity, shifting in all directions, and the origin of the most furious gales in the northern hemisphere”.
The relationship between the symbolic and mythological is an act of construction of faith. It is like a deity of those affected to cling to and coexist in a territory where we already know that hurricanes announce their possible appearance in the second half of the year.
In this sense, the year 2008 was one of the most tragic for Cuba. In August, Hurricane Gustav appeared, category 5 and with winds of 340 km/h, devastating the West of the country. Then came Hurricane Ike, a category 4 hurricane with 230 km/h winds to hit the East and cross to Pinar del Río.
That year, the troubadour Silvio Rodríguez wrote “Huracán”:
hurricane hurricane
that you take the world to fly
hurricane hurricane
that you turn my garden
in a desert field
hurricane.
hurricane hurricane
chain your ferocity
hurricane hurricane
and don’t let go
until death
be cultured in piety.
Hurricane blows well
do not snatch health
and don’t look at who
if it rains virtue.
hurricane hurricane
I need to treat you and stay
hurricane don’t torment my sun
too many dark clouds
endure love.
Hurricane blows well
do not snatch health
and don’t look at who
if it rains virtue.
hurricane hurricane
reviewing home again
hurricane if I see you come back
I will have no other choice
to face and win
hurricane.
Life is not the same for those who have suffered the lashes of a hurricane. It cannot be the same for those who have lost their things, obtained with so much effort for years and years. It can’t be either for those who have had to restart to raise ceilings and walls and even their precious memories from the devastation. The marks of the destruction caused by the passage of a hurricane are never erased.
Even so, the meteorological phenomenon does not expire. The troubadour Sindo Garayin a kind of anthem of resistance to these phenomena, wrote “El Huracán y la palma” almost a century ago after the passage of the famous and terrible cyclone of 26. The man from Santiago, one of the pillars in the history of Cuban song , was inspired by a palm tree that, after the hurricane, when the field had been left like a forest cemetery, was left standing, stoic and firm although wounded, with a piece of wood stuck in its trunk:
The pines whistled for silence.
The quiet cedars wait for pain,
the trembling leafy ceiba smiles,
the grass on the plain submissive to die.
But there is a palm that God alone
he told the Cuban cultivate his love.
Upright and brave with a soft cocoon
that serve as a sword bent to the ground,
kissing the earth, beat the hurricane.
Of that species, of that palm, of that poetic inspiration, we are made Cubans and Cubans.
