MADRID, Spain.- 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.
However, the damage is not explained solely by the meteorological phenomenon. Decades of structural deterioration, lack of maintenance, unproductive policies and corruption have left eastern communities extremely vulnerable. Melissa only deepened the collapse of a country that was already in ruins.
While Díaz-Canel insisted on highlighting “organization” and “resilience” as key elements of the state response, the reality on the ground shows homeless families, flooded neighborhoods, impassable roads, collapsed electrical services and communities that survive mainly thanks to solidarity between neighbors and the support of relatives abroad, not to State institutions.
The regime also acknowledged that the recovery will be “prolonged,” but did not offer timelines, available resources, or transparent mechanisms for the distribution of materials. At the same time, they have begun to arrive international aid, without public clarity about how they will be managed or under what criteria they will be delivered. In previous situations, deviations, opacity and conditional delivery to Communist Party structures have been reported.
The official narrative insists on attributing the severity of the situation to external causes, including the US embargo. But the disaster in the east shows a previous structural crisis, marked by the abandonment of infrastructure, the deterioration of the housing stock, the drop in production and the inability of the regime to respond to emergencies effectively.
For thousands of families, the so-called “hardest stage” does not begin now: it has already been underway for years. The hurricane only finished showing what the dictatorship has slowly destroyed, long before Melissa.
