Bonnie Klassen is the Area Director for South America and Mexico. This blog post is part of our ongoing series on food security and climate change.
I had never experienced a hurricane.
Two days before my recent flight to Cuba, I began obsessively paying attention to updates about Hurricane Irma, a category five hurricane devastating the Caribbean islands in its path. My 12-year-old son strongly questioned the wisdom of flying to an island on the same day that a hurricane was projected to hit, but if I was still going to travel, he would lend me his rubber boots. My supervisor jokingly said, “Yes, take the boots, and a shovel too. Maybe you can be useful for once.”
When I asked Luis Hernandez, the President of the Brethren in Christ Church (BIC) in Cuba, whether I should continue with my plans to visit, he responded without hesitation, “Absolutely. You need to understand our experience.”
I landed in Havana in the early afternoon on September 8th, a bit confused by the blue, sunny skies. The Cuban woman who served me lunch read the uncertainty on my face and said, “Feel that sun. The water’s hot. That is why there are three cyclones in the Caribbean right now.” It was a laypeople’s explanation of what investigations have concluded – a one-degree increase in the ocean’s temperature, due to human caused climate change, is generating a more intense hurricane season each year.
Caibarién, Cuba. Bonnie Klassen.
Together with Luis’ family in Palmira, Cienfuegos (south-central Cuba), I spent 36 hours listening to the wind howl and watching torrential rains. Even though I was in a very safe building, around 100kms away from the north side of the island where Irma had seized onto the coastline and advanced at a destructively slow pace, my stomach churned. Since before dawn on that Saturday, most of the island lost electricity and we had limited access to news.
When would the hurricane finally turn away?
The only battery-powered radio in the house was inside a light blue stuffed toy hippopotamus. If we held the left back leg up to our ears, we could sometimes decipher an update. I wasn’t afraid, but something about the defiant cry of the wind left me anxious until it finally diminished to silence.
Caibarién, Cuba. Bonnie Klassen.
In the following days, this anxiety was replaced by the jitters as numerous meals were replaced with strong coffee infused with excessive sugar. Even before the radio told us that the official “recuperation phase” had begun, we began to drive past endless fallen hydro posts and trees snapped to pieces, to visit the communities most affected. It’s unpredictable what kind of food is available in stores during the best of times in Cuba, but now the shelves were bare. A few of the people we met expressed absolute despair in the face of great loss, but most people were very busy trying to make basic repairs….and jokes. Life continues.
In Remedios, we found 80-year-old Alberto up on his roof trying to cover a hole. His wife Gladys told me how she had to force him to sit on the other side of their narrow front room during the storm because he got hysterical watching the wind blow the bedroom’s zinc roof up, like a flap, and then slam it down, playing for hours.
The coastal town of Caibareín was largely demolished. Yet solidarity immediately flourished. The BIC pastor Yoel Balbusano, and his wife Daily, live in a small room, the size of a double bed and three chairs yet are hosting three neighour women who lost the roof off of their home.
Near Cárdenas, I distracted Don José Antonio for an hour from the monumental clean-up task on his farm, while he showed me what was still standing, and all the trees, avocados, mamey and coffee beans strewn on the ground. He is a forestry engineer that has dedicated these last three years to cultivating food on his grandfather’s farm because, according to him, if he grows more food, people in the community can buy at a lower cost.
I watched the wind pull the first avocado tree down, and then I had to look the other way. It was too painful…but we won’t let this discourage us. It is a lot of hard work, but we will keep growing food. Interestingly, the very first tree I planted with my grandmother, when I was four years old, is still standing. -Jose Antonio
The standing lime tree. Bonnie Klassen.
The coffee-meals alternated with high-protein meals – far more protein than my usual diet or that of any normal Cuban. In the best-case scenario, some communities would be reconnected to electricity after 4 days, while others would have to wait weeks. A months’ worth of meat rations was consumed in a couple of days, because what wasn’t eaten would rot. Pastor Luis told me that the second hurricane was coming close behind – hunger. That made the seemingly irrational consumption of meat even stranger, but little could be done to resolve this contradiction.
Otoniel Gonzalez, his wife Maylen Aposta and their son Aaron. Bonnie Klassen.
In the community of Vueltas, the BIC pastor Otoniel Gonzalez, said:
“It’s very hard for me to have not lost very much and to have so many people around me face such great loss, but I hope that we can bring hope to people’s lives. We hope this is an opportunity for people to encounter God through the response of the church. Some people will blame God but this is not God’s fault. It is climate change. This destruction is of our own making.”
While trying to reconcile sleep without an electric fan during Cuban summer nights, my mind tried to sort through the connections in my head between the irrational but unavoidable over-consumption of meat that day, at least remotely caused by the irrational but avoidable over-consumption of everything every day by some of us in this world. My (our) daily life choices and the public policies of our governments are played out in the impact of changing weather patterns on the daily lives of our brothers and sisters around the world.
Something to pay attention to, if I want to be useful.
Visit MCC’s website to donate to relief efforts for those impacted by Hurricane Irma.