Poverty and Solidarity Portrayed in Rio Cauto, Granma, Cuba
In the Cauto River basin, as in many of the affected areas, the images reveal deep, long-accumulated poverty.
By Claudia Rafaela Ortiz Alba and Marcel Vila Marquez (La Joven Cuba)
HAVANA TIMES – Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Santiago de Cuba at 3:10 a.m. on October 29, 2025, with maximum sustained winds of 195 km/h. Just hours earlier, its passage over Jamaica as a Category 5 storm had made it the most powerful storm to make landfall in 90 years, and the strongest cyclone of the Atlantic season that ends on November 30th.
Its path across Cuba cut through a very mountainous area, bringing heavy rainfall and breaking precipitation records. This produced the worst possible scenario: massive runoff, flash floods, and large-scale inundations in places like Río Cauto. Its destructive power caused severe and widespread damage across all eastern provinces, especially in communities that were already in highly vulnerable situations.
In the days following Melissa, Cuban civil society, international organizations, the public and private business sectors, local authorities, communities, and the government have collaborated to manage, transport, and distribute humanitarian aid in the affected areas. And although we are far from the desired levels of coordination and effectiveness, what we have seen is not a bad situation—except for Cuba’s scarcity of resources, which also weakens the country’s capacity to respond to climate crises and natural disasters.
An example of this solidarity was the caravan “Río Cauto in Our Hands,” organized by residents of that locality who now live in Havana, with logistical support from the private company Pedro Carr, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), local authorities, and other independent actors. It represents an example of multilateral collaboration among different parties involved in a transformation process—not a deep one, but one that offers immediate relief to affected communities.
The group delivered free food and hygiene kits, including milk, canned goods, and insect repellent, along with essential household appliances and rechargeable lamps in three consejos populares of the Río Cauto municipality: Cauto del Paso, Grito de Yara, and Cauto Embarcadero. They also surveyed additional basic needs so they could return with more aid in the coming weeks.
Though this is not an unfamiliar landscape, in the Cauto River basin—as in many affected areas—the images reveal deep, long-accumulated poverty, as if living conditions had remained unchanged for a century, despite transformation processes that have failed to guarantee even a basic standard of living for residents. Everyone repeats, rightly, that poverty existed long before Melissa, but its ferocity now is overwhelming, as is the high vulnerability of these populations to disasters and diseases such as arboviruses, which are spreading across the country.
What can be done? Humanitarian assistance is not transformative enough to change that reality; it cannot always do so, nor is it always meant to. What comes next?
Cauto del Paso is a flat, rural, impoverished community in the middle of the Cauto River basin, abundant in rivers and reservoirs. An old Ecured (Cuba’s online encyclopedia) entry notes a little more than 500 inhabitants and “a housing stock of 162 homes, in fair or poor condition.” The most recent census, done after Melissa by social workers to register donations, counted just over 70 homes.
In Cauto del Paso there is no family doctor, no workplaces, no cultural or sports facilities, and now hardly any roads. In the memories of its residents, only Flora (1963) and Melissa (2025) have completely buried the place in water and mud, from the grass to the treetops. In both deluges, only what could float survived.
In Grito de Yara there has been no electricity or water since the day before Melissa hit. In two weeks, charcoal has been sold only once—at 1,000 pesos a sack—which lasts four or five days. In the mornings, the smoke from burning wood and plastic used to prepare breakfast is the alarm clock. Trucks arrive to ration and deliver water on the sidewalks, 200 liters per family, to be hauled up stairs to second to fifth floors in jugs and buckets. The community organizes itself as best it can.
Electricity has been a luxury long before any of the cyclones this year or last. Some neighbors, those who could, fairly divided pieces of land between their buildings to set up rustic wood-burning stoves. Many are shared or lent. Others do not mind the soot in their apartments or the smoke-scented sheets on the clotheslines; their nonós (charcoal stoves) remain on balconies and stairwells. They cannot or will not go downstairs. They are caregivers, or simply too tired. Returning to the wood-fire stoves has been a brutal blow to autonomy, time, and quality of life—especially for women, who in these environments continue to bear nearly all the household burden.
In the evacuation center set up in the Ernesto Che Guevara semi-boarding school, in the Grito de Yara Consejo Popular, hundreds of people from more than 40 families have been living together for over 20 days. Some have nowhere to return to after Melissa; for others, their homes are still uninhabitable. Some are total collapses; in others, water still fills the interior.
Children, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with disabilities sleep on mats; everyone else—women and men—sleep on sheets on the floor. There, although not always on time and not with the quality required, they receive food, basic medical attention, and a roof over their heads.
The place smells of urine and sweat, the consequence of a facility with few bathrooms and not designed to house so many people for so many days. The adults look sad and irritated; the children less so—they have the schoolyard and its equipment to play with.
Poverty is a complex problem with no boundaries and no single definition. Available information shows a rise in poverty and food insecurity in Cuba that many find alarming.
In contrast, official discourse rarely uses the terms poverty or inequality, which carry greater political weight. It prefers euphemisms or behavioral phrases instead of explicitly addressing the systemic nature of the problem.
Despite the scarcity of data to study or understand poverty in Cuba, sociologist Mayra Espina, in an interview with the podcast La Sobremesa, using basic-basket calculations by economist Omar Everleny, estimates that around 40–45% of Cubans live in poverty.
Another illustrative indicator is Cuba’s inclusion in UNICEF’s 2024 child food poverty report. This indicator measures “the inability of young children to obtain and consume a nutritious and diverse diet during early childhood (the first five years of life).” According to the report, the overall prevalence of child food poverty in Cuba is 42%, a figure above the Latin American and Caribbean average of 38%. Of that 42%, 9% are in severe food poverty, meaning they consume fewer than 2 of the 8 food groups considered necessary for healthy childhood development.
Poverty is almost always accompanied by inequality. And although Cuba does not have recent official data on inequality either, it is easy to intuit—based on collective experience—the rapid deepening of the social gap, the result of the thirty-year economic, social, and later political crisis the country is going through. This situation has worsened with the 2021 reform (known as the monetary ordering), which further reduced subsidies for the poorest and devalued the national currency, causing state wages to lose much of their purchasing power.
Faced with inequality—like poverty—Cuban society has greatly suffered. These conditions continue to erode people’s sense of fulfillment and self-worth, threaten the country’s long-term development, and entrench the absence of opportunities and limited access to resources.
Having information about Cuba and comparative studies is essential to define, measure, and understand the scope and dimensions of poverty, inequality, and vulnerability— and to estimate the resources needed to resolve or mitigate them. However, as researcher Tamarys L. Bahamonde notes, “it is important (…) to remember that behind those numbers are human beings with aspirations, abilities, and truncated lives (…). Statistics, though essential, are instruments that cannot be separated from the moral and human complexity of certain problems.”
Neither dignity, nor democracy, nor freedom, nor development exist in the abstract. They are a family doctor in Cauto del Paso, safe roads, comfortable housing, food, employment, water, developed agriculture, electricity… They are care for life, for the ideas of emancipation, and for happiness.
First published in Spanish by Joven Cuba and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.