SANTA CLARA, Cuba. – Caribbean history has been marked by terrible hurricanes; some of which are remembered with extreme regret for their dire consequences despite the passing of the years. One of these natural phenomena, which occurred in 1930, would be considered among the most devastating and catastrophic of that century, especially due to the damage caused in Dominican Republic.
It had been barely two weeks since the military Rafael Leonidas Trujillo had taken possession of the Dominican Government when, after noon on Wednesday, September 3, there was an unexpected rain followed by electrical storms that many considered temporary bad weather. It was, however, the entry into Santo Domingo of a powerful category four cyclone, the one named San Zenón, which would leave 3,000 dead and 20,000 injured due to the scourge of its 240 kilometer per hour winds.
San Zenón is classified as one of the most devastating hurricanes in the history of the Caribbean country with losses that exceeded 15 million dollars and historical records of more than 10,000 wooden and zinc houses that were completely destroyed. “The population took to the streets after the first onslaught of the phenomenon, believing that the cyclone had already passed when, in reality, it was its center,” the newspaper describes the incident. Free Diary.
It turns out that, at that time, the legendary Trío Matamoros was in Santo Domingo as part of their first trip to that country, where they were already quite popular. Miguel Matamoros would remember years later in an interview with Lino Betancourt that they were staying at a friend’s house waiting for their return to the Island when that unusual storm surprised them.
Accustomed to “the Matamoros” (Siro, Miguel and Cueto) to the dangerous onslaught of hurricane-force winds, they decided to immediately take refuge under a colonial masonry hearth to which they placed a zinc as a door for greater protection. Miguel Matamoros would later describe that “the wind was so strong that it blew away the tiles from the roof of the house.” “The moment came when I thought I wasn’t telling the story,” he said.
According to what he said Cuban musicographer Alberto Mugercia told the press, who knew the aforementioned anecdote well, “the next morning without having been able to sleep a wink, with the first light of day, they left the improvised shelter, seeing that there were no houses or anything around them, and that everything had been razed and they had been miraculously saved inside that hearth.”
But the story doesn’t end here. The report of the severe damage to the San Zenón had reached Cuba immediately and people close to the trio assumed their death as they had not heard from them during that entire week. Although the Dominican press included among the survivors of the “trio of Cuban musicians who had arrived in Santo Domingo 13 days before the elections to perform a series of presentations,” the good news had not yet reached the Island.
Miguel himself related: “The word spread that we had died and I even came out speaking at a spiritual mass.” The shock of his return to Santiago de Cuba on an army plane was such that some fans attributed the virtue of immortality to him. “The cyclone did a lot of damage, and it did a lot of damage to me because I saw a lot of dead people and I had to carry a lot of dead people,” also recalled the author of universal themes such as They are from the hill and He who plants his corn.
From that disastrous experience would derive one of the most popular sounds of Matamoros, called The trio and the cyclone, which in its chorus says: “Uncertain spiritualists, of which there are many over there, stubbornly insisted that the trio had died. Every time I remember the cyclone, my heart gets sick.”
