Charley was the first hurricane since 1915 to hit Havana directly. Winds that gusted to nearly 160 miles per hour tore trees up by their roots and destroyed or damaged houses, schools, and factories. At the main electrical plant in Mariel, west of the capital, 26 huge towers were blown down, cutting off power to the city of Havana and the entire island west of the capital.

For the 24 hours before the hurricane, residents of Havana and the rural areas around the city organized themselves through their unions, neighborhood organizations, and schools to evacuate people from low-lying areas and structurally weak buildings. More than 215,000 people and 150,000 animals were moved to safer ground and to shelters. Emergency measures were enacted to guarantee food and water supplies. In spite of all the precautions, four people were killed by collapsing buildings or drowning. This is more than the total number of hurricane fatalities in Cuba during the previous two years.

The extent of Hurricane Charley’s destruction became known in the course of the week that followed, as working people in Havana province mobilized to clean up the streets and repair buildings. More than 70,000 houses were partially or totally destroyed and thousands of acres of crops lost. Nearly 800 schools, over 300 health centers, and more than 120 cultural and sports facilities were damaged. Havana has always been a very green city, especially the western neighborhoods that bore the brunt of this hurricane.

An estimated 8,000 trees were downed by Charley, some of them a century old. The Forestry Service and city government have promised to plant one new tree for every one lost, but this will take time. In the meantime, they are trying to salvage as much of the wood as possible for lumber, and thousands of bushes and shrubs have already been planted.

Damage to the national electricity grid cut off power to the entire western agricultural province of Pinar del Rio for 11 days. Pinar del Rio is famous for tobacco, and 50 percent of the tobacco-curing buildings were demolished. Hardest-hit in terms of agricultural production was the poultry industry; the region affected by the hurricane supplies all Havana’s eggs, a major source of protein in the diet. The mango season is basically over, several weeks ahead of schedule, because virtually all the remaining fruit on the trees was lost. Charley was an unusually dry hurricane, bringing very little relief from the drought Cuba has been suffering, and no rain at all to the most drought-stricken eastern provinces.

Economic losses to Cuba from Charley totaled more than US$1 billion. The U.S. government offered to donate $50,000 to hurricane victims, but only to “independent” organizations. The Cuban government refused this pittance. “‘Independent’ of what?” said one young woman, shown on TV news in front of the ruins of her house. “‘Independent’ of our mobilizations of solidarity?”

The response of the population to the hurricane was immediate and well organized. Voluntary brigades of neighborhood residents worked with soldiers and others from dawn of August 13 to clear the streets of fallen branches or whole trees and of other debris. With the assistance of electrical engineers and technicians who came in from other parts of the country, they worked to restore power and repair the thousands of fallen electrical cables and wires.

Members of the Union of Young Communists and thousands of social workers went house to house, checking on people and trying to connect them with food and drinking water. Industrial workers were organized by the Cuban workers federation to repair their own plants, and, if these were intact, to work on other production facilities.

The head of the Committee for Defense of the Revolution in the neighborhood where I stay, Antonio “Bolo” Benítez, 65, told me August 15 he had just returned from working all day in one of the hardest-hit places, a coastal village west of the city. Of the 300 houses there, only 10 were left standing, he said. Waves of sea water had penetrated 1 kilometer inland, leaving dead fish and shattered buildings behind. But no lives were lost there.

The priority that government and Communist Party leaders have emphasized is doing whatever it takes to restore Havana to normalcy in the shortest time possible. This is being accomplished through a combination of organized voluntary work and the government’s mobilization of all the material resources available. Hundreds of trucks are being used almost around the clock to pick up debris and to deliver building materials to the communities and individuals who are rebuilding. The government has promised that the start of the school year in September will not be delayed or affected. Reporters from Juventud Rebelde, the newspaper of the UJC, visited one of the damaged schools and talked to some children who were helping parents and teachers clean up the yard. The youngsters, aged 8 to 10, told the reporters their own school was fine. But they had heard from friends that this one was in bad shape and they came to help out.

There was a call for an all-out mobilization of voluntary labor for the weekend of August 21-22, one week after the hurricane. Saturday was for repairs to workplaces, organized primarily by the unions and youth organizations, and Sunday was for neighborhood projects, organized block by block by the Committees for Defense of the Revolution. As I walked around my neighborhood between 7 and 8 o’clock Sunday morning, there were groups of a dozen people or so working on each block. Working with machetes, rakes, and brooms, they were cutting the grass, piling up branches and other debris, spreading out the water in puddles so that it evaporated and didn’t become a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and replanting bushes and small trees. According to the press, over 170,000 Havana residents participated in the weekend mobilizations. Another day of voluntary work was organized August 28 to finish the cleanup.

After events like this, everyone has stories to tell, and many have suffered and continue to suffer hardship. But the mood is one of confidence and optimism, and Havana seems to be returning to normal in many ways. There are still frequent blackouts, however, which last from a few minutes to several hours, and about half the traffic lights in the city are not working.

There are many complaints about the blackouts, especially during the Olympics, which were being broadcast here on two channels. When the Cuban baseball team was playing against Australia for the gold medal, the Cuban TV announcer made a special appeal to those watching in Havana to turn off any unnecessary electrical appliances. It must have worked. The power stayed on long enough for everyone to see the home team win.
 
 
Related articles:
Charley’s differential impact
Charley hits Florida, devastating workers’ lives  
 
 
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