CUBA: Hurricane Debby Brings Hope to Drought-Stricken Region

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

GUANTANAMO, Cuba, Aug 25 2000 (IPS) - The rains brought by hurricane Debby — weakened to the category of tropical storm — in southeastern Cuba have brought new hopes to the residents of the province of Guantanamo, who have been suffering the most severe drought of the past 10 years.

“At last Saint Peter remembered us!” a Guantanamo resident told the local TV station, turning a blind eye to the damages that the heavy rainfall could bring this region, located 900 kms east of Havana.

While local authorities warn of the risk of flooding and landslides in mountainous parts of the province, the people of Guantanamo are simply relieved to finally see water again.

Until just a few days ago, along the highway running to Maisí, Cuba’s easternmost municipality, entire families could be seen with jugs and basins, trying to collect the last puddles of water left in the dry riverbeds.

But in most riverbeds, not even that was possible. More than 10 months of severe drought have devastated crops, dried up rivers and reduced the water stored in reservoirs to less than 30 percent of the province’s capacity.

“Mangos, mangos and mangos. It has been very difficult to grow any other food in this soil,” said Luz María Gutiérrez, a resident of the city of Guantanamo who frequently travels to the mountains of Maisí, where the rest of her family lives.

But meteorologists warn that the hopes revived by the rains may be unfounded, because the extremely dry soils will not derive much benefit if the rainfall is short-lived.

Debby began to pick up steam early Tuesday, turning into a hurricane while passing over the northern part of the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico.

But the storm, the first to pose a threat to Cuba in the current hurricane season, lost strength as it moved over southeastern Cuba Thursday and continued on its way west.

In the 20th century, Cuba was hit by 100 cyclones, 10 of which were classified as major hurricanes. Experts are now recommending that this Caribbean island nation begin preparing itself to deal with a phase of heavy storm activity over the next 20 years.

José Rubiera, the head of the Institute of Meteorology’s Forecast Centre, said that warning arose from the cyclical nature of the phenomenon, in which phases of major storm activity and then stages of calm last 20 to 25 years on average.

For example, the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were a relatively calm period for Cuba, while 41 hurricanes hit the island from 1995 to 1999 alone.

The north Atlantic region, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean sea, ranks fourth in the world in terms of the formation of cyclones, with an annual average of 9.4 tropical storms and six hurricanes.

The category of tropical storm involves winds of over 63 kms an hour. A storm becomes a hurricane when the winds reach 119 kms an hour.

Some 12,000 people were evacuated in the province of Guantanamo alone when the General Staff of Civil Defence recently declared a cyclone alert for the eastern provinces.

According to the latest meteorological report, 260 mms of water had fallen by Thursday afternoon in the most populous municipalities of the province of Guantanamo, although no significant flooding was reported.

But Rolando Calzada, the head of Civil Defence in the province, pointed out that less severe storms than Debby caused flooding in 1993 and 1994 that left damages of over 332 million pesos (on par with the dollar at the official exchange rate).

Civil Defence authorities in the province declared a drought alert in mid-April, when average rainfall in the province stood at just 36 percent of the average registered in the past 40 years.

By April, the drought was already affecting 82 communities and 45,000 people — numbers that have continued to mount since then. In the agricultural sector, crops were damaged and hundreds of hectares were not even planted.

In April, the provincial government began carting in drinking water to several towns, by truck. And in July, the National Weather Centre warned that the lack of rainfall in the eastern region could continue through October.

Sources at the Institute of Meteorology’s Weather Observation Department ranked the April to June period this year among the six quarters with the lowest rainfall readings in the past 58 years.

The drought has affected, in one way or another, eight of the country’s 14 provinces. But Guantanamo is one of the three with the least chances of leaving the drought behind in the next few months, said Ramón Pérez, with the Institute of Meteorology.

The drought began to be felt last December, when high pressure over the Atlantic gave rise to cold fronts with little rainfall during the dry season (November to April) in the Caribbean.

“It is not the same to have a process of drought in the dry period, than in the months of May, June, September and October, when large quantities of rain usually fall,” Pérez pointed out.