[News] Cuba: a tale of two hurricanes

[Anti-Imperialist News]

peoplesdispatch.org
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/10/14/cuba-a-tale-of-two-hurricanes/>
Cuba: a tale of two hurricanes
Rosa Miriam Elizalde - October 14, 2022
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[image: image.png]

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel takes part in relief work in the
aftermath of Hurricane Ian. Photo: Ismael Batista Ramírez/Granma

Ernest Hemingway learned in Cuba that the best way to get through a
hurricane is to have your ears tuned to a battery-powered radio and keep
your hands busy with a bottle of rum and a hammer to nail down doors and
windows. The American writer appropriated the typical jargon of Cuban
meteorologists and fishermen who speak of “the sea” in the feminine and of
the hurricane as a demon or evil sorcerer, and who, when a storm leaves the
island, usually say that “it entered in the channel” or that “it crossed
the land.”

>From the clashes with the cyclones and the turbulent waters came that jewel
of literature, *The Old Man and the Sea*, which made William Faulkner,
another giant, exclaim that Hemingway had found God.

On an island located at the crossroads of the winds, it is impossible not
to live with the culture of hurricanes that have existed in the Antilles
since the most remote evidence of life, some 6,000 years before Christ. The
Taínos, Indigenous Cubans, gave the phenomenon its name and drew a spiral
to represent the hurricane, a rotating symbol of the wind, which could be
embodied in a monstrous serpent capable of wrapping the entire universe in
its body.

In both reality and mythology, the hurricane has produced “tremendous
fantasies” alike, in the words of the greatest Cuban novelist, Alejo
Carpentier, who was inspired by the passage of the 1927 meteor over Havana
to write some passages for his novel *Ecue- Yamba – O!* The storm,
Carpentier wrote, caused the movement of “houses, intact, several
kilometers from their foundations; schooners pulled out of the water, and
left on a street corner; granite statues, decapitated from a chopping
block; mortuary cars, paraded by the wind along squares and avenues, as if
guided by ghost coachmen and, to top it off, a rail torn from a track,
raised in weight, and thrown on the trunk of a royal palm with such
violence, that it was embedded in the wood, like the arms of a cross.”

There are no significant differences between that description and what we
have witnessed again in Cuba. Hurricane Ian left three dead and more than
89,000 homes affected in the province of Pinar del Río, caused the
destruction of thousands of hectares of crops, led to trees and street
lighting poles falling everywhere, left the country in total darkness for
hours and with thousands of stories that turn anything told by two literary
geniuses like Hemingway and Carpentier into pale tales.

The destruction can have infinite variations, but the hurricane is one of
the few things that has not changed in thousands of years for the people of
the Antilles. Whatever it may be called and whatever maybe be the strength
of its fury, both the ancient and modern worlds have considered it a living
creature that comes and goes over time and is not always cruel. When the
excesses do not occur, the waters and the winds cool the summer heat and
benefit agriculture, and everyone is happy.

However, this will be the first time that such a well known and recurrent
natural phenomenon passes through Cuba accompanied by another equal or
greater destructive force that has been created artificially in the new
digital laboratories and is capable of such an evil that our Taíno
ancestors could not have foreseen it.

While gusts of wind of more than 200 kilometers per hour blew in the north
of Pinar del Río, more than 37,000 accounts on Twitter replicated the
hashtag *#CubaPaLaCalle* (Cuba to the streets), with calls for protests,
roadblocks, assaults on government institutions, sabotage, and terrorism,
and with instructions on how to prepare homemade bombs and Molotov
cocktails. Less than 2% of the users who participated in this virtual
mobilization were in Cuba. Most of those who made the call to “fire up” the
streets in Cuba were connected to American technology platforms and did so
while hundreds of kilometers away from the country that remained in
darkness. Perhaps some on the island kept their battery-powered radio.
Still, what millions of Cubans had in the palm of their hands was not a
bottle of Hemingway’s rum but a cellphone connected to the internet (the
country of 11 million inhabitants has 7.5 million people with access to
social media).

Let’s do an exercise. Imagine this panorama: you are anguished with the
here and now. You have no electricity and no drinking water. What little
food you have bought with great difficulty and kept refrigerated will go
bad in no time. You don’t know what has happened to your family that lives
in the western provinces, where the damage is apocalyptic. You have no idea
how long this new crisis will last. Daily life before the hurricane was
already desperate due to the economic blockade imposed by the United
States, inflation, and shortages being faced by Cubans. Still, you see on
your mobile that “everyone” (on the internet, of course) seems to be doing
well and has plenty, while thousands of people on social media (and their
trolls) shout that the culprit of your misfortune is the communist
government. Your only light source is the mobile screen, which works like
Plato’s allegory of the cave: you sit with your back to a flaming fire
while virtual figures pass between you and the bonfire. You only see the
movements of their shadows projected on the walls of the cave, and those
shadows whisper the solution to your desperate reality: *#CubaPaLaCalle*.

At no other time in history has an immigrant minority had so much economic,
media, and technological power to try to sink their country with their
relatives still in Cuba before even trying to lend a hand in the midst of a
national tragedy. What Mexican who lives in the United States puts
political differences above helping their relatives after an earthquake?
Why don’t Salvadorans or Guatemalans who live abroad do it now that
Hurricane Julia has devastated Central America.

It is unprecedented and unheard of that the hurricane of a lifetime, and
the hurricane of virtual hatred can arrive simultaneously, but that is just
what happened in Cuba.

*This article was produced by Globetrotter
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-10-13/rm5gbk/1166616763?h=4Ad7UcykAR2SZAziSHt9Fn26-ETHRPn8vfD2zm93oNE>
and
was first published on La Jornada
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/uracan-sobre-huracan-20221013-/rm5gbn/1166616763?h=4Ad7UcykAR2SZAziSHt9Fn26-ETHRPn8vfD2zm93oNE>.*

*Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist and founder of the site
Cubadebate. She is vice president of both the Union of Cuban Journalists
(UPEC) and the Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP). She has
written and co-written several books including Jineteros en la
Habana and Our Chavez. She has received the Juan Gualberto Gómez National
Prize for Journalism on multiple occasions for her outstanding work. She is
currently a weekly columnist for La Jornada of Mexico City.*
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