By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on November 7, 2024
Hurricane Rafael
The word everyone mentions now in Cuba is “hurricane”. Eleven have swept through the Caribbean in the current hurricane season and two made landfall in Cuba with catastrophic effects. At the end of October, Hurricane Oscar caused eight deaths, more than 12,000 homes affected, hundreds of thousands of people without electricity and roads destroyed by a trail of floods, rains and landslides never seen before in an area of historic droughts in the eastern part of the island.
As I write these lines, the winds of Hurricane Rafael, which began to hit western Cuba on Wednesday afternoon, can be felt. The water has invaded the coastal neighborhoods of the west of the island, with waves up to 10 meters high in Havana that forced the evacuation of some of the most famous hotels on the Malecon and numerous relief operations by the emergency services. Flooding due to rising sea levels spread through the streets of the city, creating spontaneous rivers between buildings. We have no news of fatalities, so far.
Cuba is the island of hurricanes and has a Civil Defense system that is very tough with these natural phenomena, but it is not normal to have such an active year in the Caribbean. Hurricane Helene was especially deadly and was accompanied by torrential rains in Georgia, western Carolinas, eastern Tennessee and southern Virginia. It left 227 people dead, making it the second deadliest hurricane in the United States, behind only Katrina in 2005.
Cuba’s deputy prime minister, Inés María Chapman, a hydraulic engineer by profession, warned in declarations to Cuban Television that climate change has altered rainfall patterns and weather behavior in Cuba. In San Antonio del Sur, a municipality in Guantánamo province, for example, Oscar’s rains reached an exceptional record of 427 millimeters in a short period, an unusual amount of water that the semi-arid areas of this region are not prepared to absorb. As during the cold drop phenomenon in the Valencian community, with similar precipitation levels, this excessive rainfall caused rapid and severe flooding that reached the roofs of homes in San Antonio.
As was the case in Valencia, the orography of San Antonio del Sur contributed to the severe flooding. The municipality is surrounded by mountains and has a system of subway and surface tributaries that, under normal conditions, have minimal flow or are dry. However, extreme rainfall and landslides due to saturated mountains caused the rivers to rise suddenly, causing a massive accumulation of mud and water that flooded much of San Antonio.
Climate change is also affecting the frequency, intensity and behavior of hurricanes significantly in the Caribbean, although it is this region that contributes the least to global greenhouse gas emissions. The Caribbean is literally sinking a few centimeters with each passing decade and hurricanes are becoming more intense due to rising ocean temperatures. Warm waters are the “fuel” that feeds these systems, and as the ocean absorbs more heat, hurricanes tend to intensify rapidly and more frequently reach categories four or five, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Hurricanes are also moving more slowly. Oscar made history in Cuba because with a diameter of only 10 kilometers it spent 25 hours inside Cuban territory, moving at 4 kilometers per hour, that is, at the pace at which a person walks, and with wind gusts of over 130 kilometers per hour. This means that these storms can now affect a region for a longer period of time and have erratic behaviors that increase wind and rain damage, especially in settlements near the sea, in an island that has more than 5,000 kilometers of coastline.
Droughts, heat waves, fires and hurricanes, climate change is neither theoretical nor distant. In Cuba, the winds of Rafael that this Wednesday hit the west of the island with fury painfully remind us that it is the human being who is provoking the capricious and deadly behavior of the hurricane, which obeyed ancestral logics. “Huracán” was a Taino deity whose name meant ‘center of the wind’ and coexisted with two other cemíes that controlled ‘the productive waters’ and the ‘good weather’, facing each other to maintain stability in the lives of the Tainos. Not anymore.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English