In El Cobre, only the brick dwellings resisted; the hurricane damaged the stained glass windows of the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Charity and tore off doors and windows
14ymedio, Havana/ Madrid, 30 October 2025 — The Cuban Government holds its breath as populations remain incommunicado 24 hours after Hurricane Melissa passed. No fatalities have been reported so far, but Miguel Díaz-Canel, who last night accused those asking about deaths of being “vultures,” does not close the door to that possibility. “There may be some deceased and we will report it with all honesty,” he said, delivering a diatribe against those who are “thinking or looking for the people’s pain as an argument to try to demoralize, to try to disunite, to try to discredit what this country has done with its heroic people.”
The Cuban leader was at the head of a meeting of the National Defense Council, broadcast on State TV’s Mesa Redonda [Round Table] program, in which material damage was quantified. The testimonies collected in the east of the island were frightening, such as that of Eliécer, 43 years old, interviewed by the Spanish agency EFE. He had given himself up for dead several times when he saw the zinc slabs of his house in Guamá shaking “like a maraca. The house was shuddering, and I said, “Well, Lord, put out your mighty hand. You know what to do.’ If I die, at least I die alone,” he said. His company was his cat and his dog, drowned when the height of the water exceeded three feet.
His wife was among the more than 735,000 evacuees — to Santiago in this case — but he, he claims, “underestimated the hurricane. The EFE correspondent, who was able to reach the area, speaks of a devastating panorama, full of trees thrown along the road and the great darkness that hung over last night due to the lack of electricity, which complicated the reconnection of the hundreds of thousands of people who are without telephones in the affected area.
“If I die, at least I die alone,” he said. His company was his cat and his dog, drowned when the height of the water exceeded three feet.
In some cases, roofs have blown off; in others, the whole house is gone. The difficult situation of Vilma Cabrera falls into the second category of cases, whose miserable makeshift shack in the mountains, her only possession, was crushed by a banana tree in the middle of the mud that surrounded it. “My blood pressure went up early in the morning,” she says. Her home had not yet recovered from Sandy’s passage in 2012, and now this. The rest of her neighbors are in the same situation.
It is no surprise when it is known that the National Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity of Copper, a building more robust and cared for than the precarious small houses in the area, has been “very damaged” and needs help, according to Rogelio Dean Puerta, rector and parish priest of the sanctuary. The religious leader mentioned — without details — the death of an elderly person in the area in a note made public yesterday, but has not talked anymore about victims, either to the official or the foreign press, with which he has contact, either because the death was not linked to the event or for some other reason.
The church will resume religious activity, he said hopefully, although the hurricane “damaged half of the stained glass windows of the basilica, the carpentry, tore out doors and windows… It has been a night of much pain and tension. Hurricane Melissa hit the town of El Cobre with incredible force. Elders say they have never seen anything like this before,” he said. The municipality was left, according to his words, “devastated, practically only houses with brick roofs remained undamaged.” However, rescue teams were finally able to arrive yesterday afternoon and took the neighbors to shelters.
The preliminary damage assessment was done province by province, although there are still isolated mountain and rural areas.
Generally, the hurricane left over 400 millimeters of water in six locations and over a 100 in 72 locations. The worst waves reached six meters and the winds were devastating. On its way to the Bahamas, Melissa is still raining, but conditions will improve throughout the day, said the president of the Institute of Meteorology, Celso Pazos Alberdi.
The floods have been severe in Granma, where, in the words of the first secretary of the Communist Party, Yudelkis Ortiz, “all the rivers overflowed their banks.” More than 126,000 people have been evacuated and some 50 who were trapped have had to be rescued. The worst has been in Bartolomé Masó, Guisa, Yara, Buey Arriba, Campechuela, Niquero and Bayamo, but there are up to 13 more municipalities with damages.
Beatriz Jhonson Urrutia, president of the Provincial Defense Council of Santiago de Cuba, mentioned the 17 trapped in El Cobre who were given refuge by a doctor, all of them finally safe. Palma Soriano, San Luis, Guamá and the capital city are the most affected populations, although there are serious damages to economic sectors, including coffee and yucca. Tourism was also affected, with some initial damage at the Antonio Maceo airport (now operating) and damage to the infrastructure of hotels, like the Gran Piedra.
In Holguín, which had to protect 275,572 people, more than half in family homes, and 1,900 tourists, 109 million cubic meters of water fell in eight hours of rain. A record for the province, said First Party Secretary Joel Queipo Ruiz. In Cueto there are more than 30 houses completely submerged, although the families had been evacuated.
Finally, in Guantánamo, which had 34% of the protected population (152,180 people), 85% of the reservoirs were flooded in just 12 hours. Coffee and groceries, along with problems in telecommunications and housing, are now the most affected. While Las Tunas wasn’t the worst, and although some houses and crops (banana and corn) had partial problems, the rains have almost brought relief by filling empty reservoirs.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, appeared to say that there was no damage to the thermoelectric power plants in the area –Antonio Maceo, Renté, in Santiago de Cuba, and Lidio Ramón, Felton, in Holguín — and that both were reconnected. However, 3.5 million people were left without electricity and many hours of blackouts. The official was pleased with the result of protecting the solar panels, since, he says, the impact has been minimal (four in total were damaged in Las Tunas).
However, 3.5 million people were left without electricity and many hours of blackouts
Other infrastructure affected were the Etecsa lines, both fixed and mobile and fiber-optic, and it will take days to repair the infrastructure because of the fallen branches, trees, poles and towers. In total, 75% of the inhabitants of eastern Cuba are offline. Hospitals, educational centers and roads are also damaged.
The program was extended for many more minutes to address recovery, including for education, which does not yet have a timetable to resume classes. It will take many days to assess the damage and start preparing a response program that many distrust, since they have spent 13 years waiting for help after the passage of Hurricane Sandy, as did the woman interviewed by EFE, Vilma Cabrera, who now returns to square one without ever having left.
However, there was still more to come. With the satisfaction of having so far no dead to lament, the vote of the UN General Assembly on the resolution against the embargo, which again won by 165 votes in favor, 12 abstentions and seven against, was a bitter victory for the regime. Despite an overwhelming majority in favor of the resolution, it achieved its worst ever result.
“Everyone also knows how some of these votes were obtained, because there are always submissive, enthusiastic people like those who promise to make their country great again in the image and likeness of the god they have already chosen to serve and we know well who we are talking about. There are also those who are under the weight of economic needs that chose to abstain,” said Díaz-Canel. The president subsequently gave a very long speech thanking the officials involved in Civil Defense and the ministers. And he finished, of course, quoting “Fidel and Raúl, creators, builders and defenders of the Revolution that unites us and makes us proud.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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