Around 650 thousand people will be evacuated, according to official data. The rest must prepare as they have always done, but these are different times and the preparation is costing thousands of pesos.
HAVANA.- In a few hours Melissa It will make landfall in eastern Cuba as a hurricane of great intensity. The prolonged blackouts and the intermittency of the Internet connection have prevented many people from staying informed about its trajectory, so that warnings to anticipate the disaster have come through social networks and circulated by word of mouth in a country where, certainly, vast experience has been accumulated to deal with these atmospheric phenomena. Even so, the circumstances that have punished Cuba for more than five years, the inability of the state to recover the economy and the impression that that same state has abandoned the people to their fate, makes us fear the worst in the face of a potentially devastating impact.
Around this time last year, Hurricane Oscar devastated the province of Guantánamo leaving dead, missing and damaged infrastructure that has not yet been recovered. The most alarming thing about that episode was that the residents did not know that they were in danger because the lack of electricity prevented them from receiving the alerts, evacuating and taking measures to confront the meteor. People had to rescue each other in the midst of monstrous floods; Entire towns were cut off and their inhabitants unprotected, without food or access to drinking water. Civil society organized to send help from other provinces and help, to the extent possible and in a country where poverty has not stopped growing, those who lost everything.
The Civil Defense was revealed to be ineffective, and the memory of that ineffectiveness today multiplies the fear of those possibly affected by the passage of Melissa. The state functions as an isolated entity that can be counted on less and less, that reacts late to warnings of the spread of the epidemic, and is busy with what is happening beyond the seas while the national panorama becomes complicated in every possible way.
Around 650 thousand people will be evacuated, according to official data. The rest must prepare as they have always done, but these are different times and preparation is costing thousands of pesos, not to mention the redoubled stress because a fall in the SEN is expected that will bring large losses for the private sector and families. With a hurricane at the door and nine active viruses in the national territory, in Holguín and Santiago de Cuba they report an increase in the prices of non-perishable foods, such as eggs, which have skyrocketed from 2,300-2,500 pesos to more than three thousand for each carton of thirty units. A skinny candle costs between 100 and 150 pesos, a bag of coal 2,500 pesos – minimum – and a gas bale 25 thousand pesos, take it or leave it. The blister pack of Dipyrone or Paracetamol has risen from 500-550 pesos to 700-800 pesos, and people have no choice but to buy it because right now they cannot afford to succumb to joint pain.
Alerts travel by word of mouth, and images of the hurricane also travel through WhatsApp chats. Melissa is photogenic. On the updated maps you can see all its devastating magnificence: the well-defined eye, bands of clouds, torrential rains, winds that can uproot enormous trees and tear down what remains standing due to “miraculous static.” It’s no one’s fault, it’s nature. But a natural phenomenon of that magnitude, about to hit a country where the state has not fulfilled its function for a long time, inspires fear.
It is not that Cubans are exaggerating what Melissa brings, “as if a hurricane had never passed through here.” The thing is that today Cubans do not even have the peace of mind of being able to purchase products from the basic basket, buy a few pounds of food and fruits with their salary or go to a point of sale where, for a reasonable price, you can take home (as in other times) some sardine cans, a package of crackers and another of sweet cookies for the children, who do not stop fussing and eating when they are locked up. There is no money for the extra expense that emergencies demand, and Melissa will impact barbarism on a people that accumulates years of physical exhaustion, poor nutrition and psychological stress.
Nobody is exaggerating. The fear, chaos and anticipated sadness are perfectly justified, because people who are already poor will be even poorer in two days, when they have lost everything. And after seeing that they lost everything, they will find out that the same state that does not provide help has just launched a new package of measures to deal the final blow to what Melissa left behind.
Zero subsidies in a country full of old people and where child vulnerability increases. We will have to pay exorbitant sums for the electricity that does not exist, the water that does not arrive and the gas that appears every four months or more. Taxes will increase, dollarization will spread. Now Cuban emigration is going to completely subsidize a parasitic regime that has taken from the people everything from rice and bread to painkillers. Melissa is a temporary emergency within the persistent national emergency that will worsen in the coming weeks to close the year on a low note, with the dollar and the euro singing a duet “I wait for you in eternity.”
