Experiences and observations of Hurricane Melissa’s path through Cuba: preparations, sanctions, and citizen networks

In this blog, humanitarian practitioner and researcher Carla Vitantonio reflects on the immediate experiences of people in Cuba affected by the path of Hurricane Melissa, which slowly approached the Caribbean nation in mid-October 2025. As the Hurricane approached Cuba, various (international) NGO, citizen-led, and civil defence preparations were triggered, despite issues with international sanctions and internal bureaucracy. Though regularly battered by tropical storms and hurricanes, the experiences of Cuban people and institutions with Hurricane Melissa reveal some timely developments in the country.

We began observing Melissa on October 21^st. It was a tropical storm, one step below hurricane level, according to Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. However, we knew that its slow pace did not bode well, and realized that it wasn’t a matter of predicting whether it would pass through Cuba, but simply of understanding where.

I have been working in disaster risk prevention and management for fifteen years, seven spent in Cuba. I know the protocols and am well aware of my role in a situation like this. I have studied the preparedness system developed by the EMNDC (Estado Mayor de la Defensa Civil) in Cuba, and which many around the world admire. This system has allowed this small country in the Caribbean to survive  annual hurricanes and storm seasons since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.
Yet I live here and know that, beyond the official propaganda and its many detractors, Cuba is no longer what it once was.

Like many, I still sting with the memory of Hurricane Oscar, which devastated eastern Cuba a year ago. Last year, when a colleague from Brussels called me the day before Oscar made landfall in Cuba, to ask if we needed support, I responded with a bit of bravado: “Cubans brush their teeth with a Category 2.” And I was wrong. Even today, a year later, there is no clarity on the number of deaths or the damage caused by Oscar and the human errors that followed, and many believe that the historically efficient Early Warning System failed that time.

I’m not the only one who bitterly remembers October last year, the 3 (for some up to 7) days without electricity, refrigerators left open, as if gutted, while the luckiest ones tried to cook their stored food in an attempt to save at least some of it, the chaos of information and misinformation and the clear feeling, listening to the fragmented accounts of colleagues from the affected areas, that beyond the usual duel between the regime and dissident press, something really hadn’t worked in the preparation and response.

Unfortunately, we were not involved in any learning exercises after the fact: we don’t know whether the Civil Defense  analyzed what happened and learned any lessons, nor can we hope to know: living in Cuba means oscillating between a scandal-mongering and delegitimizing press that is mostly funded by the diaspora and quoted by international media, and a state-controlled press, which publishes only sanitized and repackaged news, increasingly detached from what we see every day on the streets.

But let’s go back to October 21^st. Melissa’s slow approach allowed everyone to organize. The Civil Defense evacuated approximately 500,000 people. In Cuba, preventive evacuations have historically been managed along two lines: anyone who finds themselves in a situation where they need to leave their homes, first looks to family members nearby living in areas designated as safe by the Civil Defense. Only a small portion go to shelters, which are generally schools temporarily set up as shelters. Cuba’s civilian evacuation mechanism does not allow for individual objections.

Recently,  a Cuban doctor that helped interrupt mother-to-child transmission of HIV told me about Cuba’s approach to HIV: “Because in Cuba, the life of every citizen is worth more than anything else. And to save it, we do everything, sometimes without caring whether someone agrees with our methods, or not. As if we had these lives at our disposal.”

I personally experienced the truth of this statement during COVID, when the state, to protect its citizens, imposed measures that would have been deemed unacceptable in many countries around the world. This was done precisely because of this duty to protect, which sometimes goes even beyond recognizing the agency of citizens. Evacuations during hurricane preparations, a painful process in which people are forced to leave behind what is most precious to them, and often even their livelihoods, work in the same way. We must save what is most precious to us: our lives. Everything else can come later.

International Reactions and Preparations

Meanwhile, mindful of the events of 2024, several European donors, including Germany, announced a couple of days before the hurricane hit that they would donate several hundred thousand euros to CERF, the United Nations emergency fund that will most likely handle the response. This is a sign of confidence in multilateralism. Unfortunately, the sixty-years long embargo (unilateral sanctions with extraterritorial effect imposed by the US), combined with the notoriously lengthy and complex internal bureaucracy in Cuba, make it virtually impossible to import any goods in less than three months—an interminable time for those who have lost their homes, and even for those wishing to provide almost immediate relief. And so, we are now witnessing creative appeals from the United Nations urging local entrepreneurs and individuals willing to respond, and who have access to products already on the local market, to come forward and join forces.
Beyond the commendable coordination effort, it is clear that the crisis the humanitarian sector has reached this country too.

Meanwhile, on October 29^th, after 24 hours of intense rain and wind, Melissa made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, hitting the provinces of Holguin, Granma, Santiago, and Guantanamo. The latter two are regions that have become extremely socially and economically impoverished in recent years, and are still struggling following the impact of Hurricane Oscar in 2024. Furthermore, these are the areas of Cuba hardest hit by the deterioration of the national electrical system and the infamous and lengthy apagones, blackouts that last for days, punctuated only by a few hours of power, which now plague the country relentlessly.

This year, the Early Warning System did not fail, and everyone is already prepared: international NGOs have alerted their local partners of the need to gather information as quickly as possible, the United Nations has activated its coordination system, and above all, the Cuban Civil Defense has mobilized the complex network of military and civilian personnel (including the Red Cross) that will handle the response in the hours immediately following Melissa’s passage. Within 24 hours, the hurricane receded, leaving behind destruction and fear, but the consequences continued for days to come: rivers, swollen by the rain, began to overflow their banks on October 31^st, especially in the province of Granma, forcing the Civil Defense to launch a massive rescue operation that even included a mass transportation of people by train.

As I write this article, it seems we have emerged from the most critical phase and that we can all deal with the very delicate recovery phase.

What have we learned, as citizens and people involved in disaster preparedness and response?

• Times have changed, and the Cuban government is slowly shifting to a different approach: on November 1st, an official gazette formally established that the government would pay 50% of the reconstruction costs for all citizens who need to rehabilitate their homes. We are therefore moving away from the “the state will take care of it” approach, which in recent years had sadly turned into empty rhetoric, given that the state no longer had the resources to handle everything. We are moving toward a supportive approach, where the state recognizes the citizens’ leading role while still striving to offer participation and support. The feasibility and sustainability of this offer remain to be seen.
• Beyond the national and international agencies traditionally responsible for response, we need to rely on all those networks of private citizens who, from areas of Cuba less affected by the hurricane and often even from abroad, offer material support and donations. This change in trend began, I recall, with the tornado that hit Havana in 2019. Just a few months earlier, Cubans had gained access to 3G connectivity on their cell phones. Thanks to it, citizen movements rapidly mobilized to provide aid beyond and regardless of the official response.
• That climate change is not an opinion, and we must think in terms of systems: for the first time we are witnessing a joint effort by agencies based in different countries (Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas) to reflect on the impact of the event and combine their energies, not only for the response, but for future preparations.
• That climate change is not an opinion (reprise), potentially disastrous events are intensifying in frequency, becoming more unpredictable in nature and, therefore becoming difficult to prepare according to the “business as usual” model.

In short, it would be interesting, beyond the usual ideological controversies that inevitably emerge when discussing Cuba, to look at this recent event as a source of learning, a pilot, something that can point us in the right direction for the future of preventing and responding to disasters.

 

Originally published in Italian on Left.

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

 

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