[News] Cuba Floods: Six Dead as Heavy Rain Hits the Island

[Anti-Imperialist News]

resumen-english.org
<https://resumen-english.org/2023/06/cuba-floods-six-dead-as-heavy-rain-hits-the-island/>
Cuba Floods: Six Dead as Heavy Rain Hits the Island
By Alejandra Garcia on June 13, 2023 from Havana


Heavy rains are leaving a desolate panorama in eastern Cuba. Entire
communities are buried under thick mud and water due to the torrential and
prolonged rains that have been lashing the country for the past weeks. So
far, six people have lost their lives in the floods, and more than 39,000
are sheltered in the homes of neighbors, relatives, or state facilities,
according to official reports from the government.

Overflowing rivers and creeks, landslides, interruption of roads, and
significant damage to homes are the most severe damages reported by
authorities. The sudden overflowing of rivers and streams, landslides, and
road blockades caused more than 25,000 people to be stranded and cut off
in isolated communities.

“The floods are unprecedented,” a resident of Jiguaní municipality, Granma,
told the press and warned that today’s scenario is reminiscent of that left
by the deadly cyclone Flora of 1963, the second largest catastrophe ever
recorded on the island.

So far, the aftermath is devastating. Thousands of homes were affected,
some of them fully covered by water, and hundreds of families lost all or
part of their belongings. The Department of Agriculture is reporting that
over 11,400 hectares of sugarcane and food producing land have been
completely inundated. Areas that had been suffering severe droughts are now
facing the exact opposite with equally disastrous results. Preliminary
reports show considerable losses in beans, maize, and yucca crops.
Thousands of families have lost basic home items, such as mattresses and
refrigerators.

Despite this latest blow that Cuba is having to deal with there has been a
flurry of hopeful images circulating in recent days: an elderly woman in
the arms of a rescuer, who moves through knee-deep muddy waters; a girl in
a small boat being pushed to a safe area by a group of neighbors; villagers
carrying on a raft the few belongings they were able to rescue from their
homes.

Once again the solidarity of the Cuban people is being put to the test as
it happens every time the island faces a hard situation. During the most
critical moments of the pandemic, government and volunteer support groups
were created to receive and send donations to the most affected areas. This
was the case in Matanzas, for example, when its hospitals began to be
saturated with COVID cases while the country faced a deficit of medical
oxygen due to not being able to procure parts for the equipment because of
the blockade. Entire communities devoted themselves to collecting
medicines, medical supplies, food, sheets, towels… to be sent to the
hospitals.

And those hard years of Covid are not the only example. It is common for
these initiatives to occur after every scourge of nature or in unfortunate
accidents. For decades, Cubans have developed the instinct to share the
little they have with those who have lost everything, especially in recent
years, which have been marked by shortages of all kinds.

Gerardo Hernandez, national coordinator of the CDRs, reviews individual
donations.

Every community in the country -and I am a witness to this- is collecting
all kinds of clothes and objects that can be useful to those who lost
everything right now. The word spread among the neighbors in my block, and
we started collecting toys, coats, cleaning products, and canned food. The
head of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), who is in
charge of receiving the donations, in my area can barely walk through the
living room of her house because of so many packages that people have been
delivering spontaneously.

Everything can be summed up in a phrase from Che, shared today by Gerardo
Hernandez, National Coordinator of the CDRs, on his Twitter account: “The
true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”.

The nightmare in the East of the country is apparently not over yet.
Authorities and Civil Defense agencies have warned that the risk of heavy
rain will remain high, coupled with possible landslides in mountainous
terrain and flash floods in flat, poorly drained urban areas and near
rivers and streams. However, no matter how much more difficult the scenario
may become. Everyone matters and no one will be left behind. Cuba has
already given proof of this.

The intensity and extreme nature of these rains this early in the season
can only be attributed to the affects of global warming that our
beleaguered earth is having to endure like never before. While this
flooding continues in Cuba massive fires in Canada with high winds has
displaced 120,000 people; many from rural indigenous communities.
Everything is connected and the Canadian fires created code red air quality
in the Northeast of the US to the point that for several days New York City
had the distinction of having the worst air quality than any place on the
planet. Meanwhile the heads of corporations, who are most responsible for
climate deterioration, continue to play their fiddles like Nero.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20230614/8e10ac98/attachment.htm>