The gray sky and the gusts of moderate wind in Havana are, since dawn this Monday, the prelude that Hurricane Ian is approaching Cuba.
The crowds in the streets, stationed in long lines or walking quickly, were another clue. Given the imminent arrival of the cyclone, which is expected to hit the island tonight, the main concern of Cubans is to get enough food to last for several days if the weather conditions worsen.
However, little is found in stores. El Cupet on Rancho Boyeros Avenue, on the corner of Ayestarán, is one of the few places where something substantial is sold, in this case, chicken thighs at 90 pesos per kilogram. It is only allowed to buy, yes, to the people to whom that establishment corresponds, according to the regulations imposed by the Havana authorities last April.
Even so, the queue was kilometers long. Several people gave up shopping for fear of running out of electricity in the next few days and that the food would spoil.
Around eleven o’clock in the morning, there was no bread anywhere either. “Bread is lost even before the cyclone,” said a resident of Centro Habana, who also criticized the fact that the day before, when the referendum on the Family Code was held, the stocked stores did appear. “Yesterday we were focused on love, but today we are back to normal,” she ironized.
In front of the bakery in Plaza de Carlos III, more than a queue, there was a concentration, also guarded by police. “I ran out of bread, I should have gone down earlier,” lamented a teenager.
Not even in freely convertible currency (MLC) stores was the picture different. In the foreign exchange market of Boyeros and Camagüey, people came to stock up, but they found that there was no canned meat, no sardines, no tuna. To make matters worse, the electricity supply was cut off and forced dozens of customers to leave the premises at noon and leave their shopping carts inside the premises without paying because “the connection with the bank to read the cards is cut when there is no electricity”, the employees clarified.
In Pinar del Río, the province expected to be hit the hardest, residents complain of a lack of preparation and supplies. “In my house it has not been possible to get even a guava bar, or some cookies. There are people in my neighborhood who have not even been able to store water because we have not had supply for days,” a resident of the provincial capital told 14ymedio.
“There is no food, I don’t see any intention of sending gas for cooking and, I don’t know why, I feel that most of the power lines will sink. Difficult times are coming for the people of Pinar del Río,” Pedro Víctor lamented on his Twitter account. , a young Internet user concerned about the situation in that territory in the face of Ian’s proximity.
As worrying as the lack of food in the face of the hurricane, about which the most recent bulletin from the Miami National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecasts maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometers per hour, was the absence of an operational of cleaning that removed the garbage from the streets – susceptible to becoming a projectile if the winds reach a certain force – or that cleaned the sewers to prevent flooding.
Díaz-Canel promised on his social networks “maximum protection of human lives and material resources. Let nothing fail. We will win.” However, the president’s voluntary message was not reflected in the streets of the capital, where only a couple of trucks were seen collecting debris from the remains of a building, near San Lázaro and Infanta.
“Everything at the last minute, because yesterday you didn’t see anything like that,” protested an old man when he saw the brief operation.
By midday, it was clear that the ministries and other official institutions had sent their workers home. Employees could be seen outside the buildings, waiting for work buses.
The airlines have canceled their flights from the island as of this Monday and until Wednesday, as reported in different messages by the Cuban Airport and Airport Services Company (Ecasa). This affects the seven Copa Airlines flights scheduled for these days and the three Conviasa flights. The companies Magní Charters, Southwest, American Airlines, Fly Always, Viva Aerobus, Air Century and Condor also announced the suspension of all their operations due to weather conditions.
Ecasa also warned of the cancellation of the International Transport and Logistics Fairwhich was originally going to take place between the 27th and the 29th and will now be between the 30th of September and the 2nd of October.
The cyclone is also forcing the cancellation of consular services, something that the embassies of the United States, Spain, Panama, Canada and Mexico have already communicated.
Ian has strengthened significantly in recent hours, and already has maximum sustained winds of 120 kilometers per hour and more violent gusts. According to the Meteorological Institute of Cuba (Insmet), Ian could reach at least category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale and will cause winds of between 65 and 80 km/h in the west of the island this Monday afternoon, which will they will increase and extend to much of the western half during the night.
In Pinar del Río and Artemisa, hurricane-force winds are expected tonight, of more than 120 km/h.
The Civil Defense General Staff decreed this Monday the “cyclonic alert” phase for six western provinces and the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud. This is the second of four stages that the Cuban authorities establish to deal with natural disasters.
The current cyclone season in the Atlantic (from June 1 to November 30) has been described as “very active” with a forecast of up to 17 cyclones, nine of them with the possibility of reaching the category of hurricane.
The Insmet has predicted that, with an 85% probability, one of those hurricanes could affect Cuba.
The last time a large hurricane affected Cuba was in 2017, when Irma crossed the north coast of the island from east to west, leaving ten dead and material losses officially valued at 13,185 million dollars.
To the north, in the United States, the threats of the cyclone expanded this Monday for the Florida Keys, with a tropical storm warning for various sectors of the Florida Keys and the west coast of this state in the next 48 hours.
The SLS rocket with the Orion spacecraft coupled for the Artemis I mission, which will travel beyond the Moon, for example, will be removed tonight from its launch pad in Cape Canaveral (Florida) and taken to a hangar due to the danger it poses Ian.
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