After the Eye: Walking the Wet, Wind-Scoured Streets Where Melissa Left Her Mark
By the time dawn peeled back the clouds over Santiago de Cuba, the world felt smaller—flattened into ruined roofs, tangle of telephone wires, and the slow, stubborn business of putting lives back together.
A farmer I met on a mud-churned lane held a shaking bundle of damp fur. “I found him under the mango tree,” he said, cradling a mud-caked dog as if it were an offering. “There’s nothing left of the shed. But he’s alive.” The dog whimpered; the man looked as if he had been carrying a week’s worth of grief in his chest.
Hurricane Melissa did not merely arrive. It announced itself with a kind of brutal certainty—storm surge, shrieking gusts and sheets of rain that turned streets into rivers. In many places the storm’s roar has subsided, but the work of counting losses, restoring power, and searching for missing kin has only just begun.
Numbers That Tell a Story
Across the Caribbean, the official counts are sobering: at least 24 confirmed deaths in Haiti, and large swathes of Jamaica and Cuba have been left in ruins. Cuban authorities say roughly 735,000 people were moved out of harm’s way—an enormous, logistically complex evacuation centered in the eastern provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Holguín and Guantánamo.
Meteorologists placed Melissa as one of the most intense storms to reach land in the region in recent memory. As the system barreled northeast, the US National Hurricane Center forecast maximum sustained winds near 165 kilometers per hour as it approached Bermuda. For many islanders, those numbers are not abstractions—they are ceilings on what a roof might endure and thresholds between a building that stands and one that does not.
Where the Damage Is Concentrated
- Haiti: 24 confirmed fatalities; heavy inland flooding and collapsed homes in coastal and low-lying areas.
- Cuba: Extensive roof loss, snapped trees and widespread communications outages in the east; major evacuations undertaken.
- Jamaica: Severe infrastructural damage in parts of western parishes; roads and bridges disrupted.
- Bahamas: Flooding expected to ease in coming hours, according to regional forecasts.
Voices From the Rubble
“We woke to the sound of trees falling,” said María, a shopkeeper near El Cobre, wiping the streaks of salt and rain from her forehead. “You try to save what you can—photos, paperwork, one tin of food. But you look at your neighbors and you know they lost more.”
“Everything is gone,” Christopher Hacker, a grower from Seaford Town in Jamaica, told me, standing among the husks of banana plants. “We planted for a year; one night took it. How do you explain that to your children?”
Felicia—who asked that her last name not be used—sat on the threshold of a collapsed block home and laughed once, a small, heartbreaking sound. “We were already scraping by,” she said. “Now we wake up and we have to learn how to breathe again.” Her comment echoed a sentiment being voiced by countless people across the battered coastline: survival after Melissa will not be only about rebuilding walls, but rebuilding lives.
Communications and Aid: A Race Against Time
Downed power lines and disrupted mobile networks have made it difficult to get a full picture of the destruction. In many places, roads are impassable. Emergency responders and humanitarian agencies describe a patchwork of accessible towns and entirely cut-off communities.
The United States has said its teams are in contact with governments across the region—Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas—and US officials signaled they were preparing rescue and response assets. Notably, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US stands ready to provide humanitarian assistance to Cuba as well, despite longstanding political tensions.
The United Kingdom announced an immediate package of £2.5 million in emergency funding and a plan to operate limited charter flights to help British nationals evacuate.
International Response—Fast but Complex
- US: Rescue and response teams being positioned; diplomatic offers extended to regional partners.
- UK: £2.5 million in emergency funds and charter flights for nationals.
- UN agencies: Teams coordinating assessments, with early appeals expected to scale up as damage reports solidify.
Climate, Attribution, and the New Normal
Behind the immediate anguish is a longer, colder arithmetic: storms of Melissa’s strength are becoming more frequent and more ferocious as a result of human-caused warming. A recent attribution study from Imperial College London suggested that Melissa was roughly four times more likely because of climate change—a stark reminder that the climate crisis is not theoretical for those living on low-lying islands and coastal plains; it is present, tracking from the sea into their homes.
“This is a brutal reminder,” said Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, “that we need urgent and accelerated climate action at scale. Every storm like Melissa is another test of our collective ability to protect the most vulnerable.”
Scientific data show sea surface temperatures across the tropical Atlantic have been above the 20th-century average for several consecutive seasons, fueling storms with more energy. NOAA has also noted that Melissa’s landfall matched some of the most intense historical events tracked in the modern record, tying a 1935 benchmark for intensity at impact in some areas.
How People Are Coping—And What Comes Next
In neighborhoods where power is out and stores are shuttered, makeshift relief efforts are taking shape. Local volunteers are distributing water and canned food from borrowed trucks; church halls have become shelters; small fishing boats have been repurposed to shuttle supplies where roads have failed.
“People here always help one another,” said Pastor Ricardo, who organized a supply run in a flooded district. “We share what little we have because the government cannot reach everyone at once. It’s how we survive storms and other things life throws our way.”
But the short-term goodwill cannot replace infrastructure: rebuilding roofs and restoring phone towers will require money—a lot of it—and political will. The eastern provinces of Cuba are already grappling with an economic crunch that predates Melissa, and Haiti’s rainy-season floods have amplified vulnerabilities that were already acute.
Questions to Carry With You
How do island nations, often contributing the least to global emissions, repeatedly absorb the worst costs of climate disruption? What does justice look like in an era when storms amplified by warming are increasingly routine? And for individuals on the ground who have lost livelihoods and loved ones, how do international promises translate into rapid, tangible support?
As Melissa shifts toward the north and weaker seas, leaving Bermuda to brace but the Caribbean to reckon with the aftermath, these questions will not evaporate. The people I spoke to want to mourn, and then to plan. They want to rebuild—but they also want to know who will help them do it this time, and next time, and the time after that.
For now, they sweep up the debris, huddle under salvaged tarps, and coax life back from the wreckage. It’s intimate work—slower and quieter than headlines, but ultimately the truest measure of resilience.
