After Hurricane Melissa ravaged eastern Cuba last month and left thousands stranded without a home, a number of church groups, private business owners, activists, artists and social media influencers have been traveling to some of the worst-hit areas, recording powerful accounts of the state of abandonment and destitution that make up everyday life in the country’s remote rural areas.
One after another, photos and videos coming out of eastern Cuba show undernourished, men, women and children dressed in rags, often with no shoes and living in makeshift homes. The images reveal not simply the destruction caused by the powerful storm, but the calamitous effects of the economic crisis gripping the country.
“I have nothing to feed my child. He has anemia, he is sick,” Rosa del Carmen Lopez, a resident of Chavaleta, a rural village in Mayarí, in the province of Holguín says in a video shared by Cuban journalist José Luis Tan Estrada. As she complains about what the hurricane did to her home, the camera shows a one-room shack with no bathroom or kitchen, no windows, the sunlight filtering through the gaps in the wooden roof and walls. Clothes are piled on the floor and on a bed she said she had to borrow. As her toddler cries, she said he has scabies because she has no water or soap to wash him with. They will soon need to leave the shack, which is not hers, she said.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asks. “Sleep with this child on the road? I have nothing because they don’t want to help me,” she said, referring to local authorities and a social worker she said she reached out for help with no success.
A video shared by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a Spain-based non-governmental organization, shows a family with a child with special needs living in similar precarious conditions, in a hut that lost its roof to the storm. The boy’s mother said she receives 2,500 Cuban pesos monthly — about $5 — in government assistance, not enough to cover his medications.
“During the delivery of aid in the provinces affected by the hurricane, we have found families living in truly inhumane conditions,” the Observatory said. “This is not about the effects of the hurricane, but about decades of impoverishment and neglect by the state.”
The organization recently published a survey estimating that 89% of Cuba’s population lives in extreme poverty.
“When we say that 89% of Cuban households live in extreme poverty, it is not just a headline or another statistic; it is the lived reality for millions of Cubans,” the Observatory said.
Long before Melissa hit the island, Cubans across the country have been sharing videos highlighting their deteriorating living conditions.
There are images of residents in the city of Matanzas collecting water from a hole in the street because they said they lack a regular water supply. Many other photos show Havana streets covered in garbage.
There are photos of a group of children sleeping on the street near a luxury hotel in Havana that created such an uproar that authorities responded — not by addressing the levels of homelessness and poverty, as many people on social media suggested, but by charging the parents with neglect.
And there’s Barbara García Jiménez showing in a video the tumors covering her body and how she lives with her two children in a decrepit house with the roof on the brink of collapse. In a low voice without looking at the camera, she asks viewers for help “within your means.” Two massive tumors hanging from her buttocks suggest she has not gotten medical attention.
In a video call from Havana, García Jiménez, 36, said she has had no treatment for her genetic condition, neurofibromatosis, in 12 years.
“Here, if you don’t have money, you have nothing,” she said. “Nothing happens if you don’t know someone. At the good hospitals, if you don’t have someone to guide you, you can’t do anything. You go, and they tell you they can’t treat you because they don’t have the resources. “
She lives with her two sons and her grandmother, who all have the same illness. She said she receives 2,600 pesos, about $6, in social assistance.
“That's not even enough for me to buy a package of chicken, or the medicines I need,” she said. “I made the video because I am in pain. I don’t feel well, and I have no help.”
Alarming poverty levels
The authors of the recent book “The Real Impact of Sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela,” published by Sergio Arboleda University in Colombia, note that policies that began after Fidel Castro handed power to his brother Raúl in 2006, such as the reduction in government assistance and the lack of investment on healthcare and education, have increased inequality, poverty and mortality on the island.
Under the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel, living conditions on the island have sharply worsened. That’s due in part to external factors — including the COVID-19 pandemic, the decrease in subsidies from Venezuela and tightened U.S. sanctions — as well as the chronic inefficiency of a socialist planned economy “that has failed everywhere,” along with poorly designed monetary policies that have fueled skyrocketing inflation, prominent Cuban-American economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago wrote in the book.
Central to the crisis is “the inability of the Cuban economy to finance its imports of goods with its own exports due to the fall in domestic production,” he added.
Mesa-Lago, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, provided an astounding figure in the book: Since the U.S. embargo began in 1961, Cuba has received about $238 billion in Soviet and Venezuelan subsidies, debt forgiveness and money sent from abroad to families in Cuba.
That’s almost 1.8 times the amount of assistance the U.S. provided Western Europe after World War II as part of the massive Marshall Plan, he wrote, and vastly greater than the $20 billion the U.S. gave to Latin America during the two decades the Alliance for Progress launched by President John F. Kennedy was in place.
And still, he added, “Cuba is currently experiencing the worst economic, political and social crisis in its history.”
The Cuban military conglomerate GAESA, which controls large segments of the economy, has played a significant role in the impoverishment of the population, stashing as much as $18 billion in secret bank accounts and directing the country’s foreign currency revenue away from social spending and investments on agriculture and other key areas to build hotels for tourists, reporting by the Miami Herald shows.
As a result, the country’s poorly maintained infrastructure is crumbling all at once, and authorities struggle to provide basic public services. The electrical grid has collapsed several times since last year, and hours-long daily blackout are the new normal.
“We don’t have enough fuel for electricity generation, water supply, hygiene control and proper food distribution,” Díaz-Canel acknowledged in October, blaming “the war without bombs we are facing,” a reference to the U.S. embargo.
He has recently insisted his government’s policies have not made the country a failed state. The proof, he said, is that no one died because of the hurricane thanks to the government’s evacuation orders.
Then, in an unscripted moment during his tour of some of the affected areas, he revealed his government’s inability to provide immediate help to those in need. A woman in the town of Cauto Embarcadero, where many lost their homes and belongings because of the flooding, told him: “We don’t have beds nor mattresses.” A visibly annoyed Díaz-Canel snapped at her: “And I just told you that I don’t have any to give you.”
He then added that she needed to wait for donations.
But the government has been slow delivering donations made by foreign governments and the United Nations, especially to the most remote areas in eastern Cuba, where members of an artists’ group called La Familia Cubana and others have been delivering aid donated by Cubans in Havana and Miami.
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Videos published by those delivering aid from the Catholic Church, the private sector or concerned citizens show some of the poorest people affected by the storm have been sleeping among the rubble inside their destroyed homes, with nowhere to go. Tents usually provided in disaster relief efforts in other countries are conspicuously absent from the images.
In a series of videos posted by Santiago de Cuba priest Leandro Naung Hung, chronicling his visits to small rural villages to distribute aid after the hurricane, there is also little sign of any help other than what he is able to provide: spaghetti, canned food, a few nails to a resident whose shack was hit by a tree during the storm.
Indeed, his videos show few signs of the government’s presence, or of modern life, for that matter, as residents of small communities in Santiago de Cuba province – El Desierto, San José, Gran Piedra – live without running water, kitchens or toilets in makeshift homes and huts that have not changed much from those Fidel Castro denounced in the 1950s as one of the reasons for his revolution.
A bony old woman living in a hovel that lost its tin roof in the San José community told the priest the hurricane caught her “sleeping.”
“We ate early and went to bed to wait for it,” she said. She told him the government gave her some tiles in 2008 for the roof, then Hurricane Sandy in 2012 destroyed everything.
“From then on, we haven’t been able to rebuild,” she said.
Cuba is ‘bankrupt’
Just days before Hurricane Melissa wrecked eastern Cuba, damaging over 90,000 homes, destroying roads and bringing down the electrical grid and telecommunications, a group of economists gathering in Miami had warned that the island’s economy had hit rock bottom.
Experts gathered at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy at Florida International University presented figures based on official data that illustrate the economic collapse: between 2019 and 2024, the island’s gross domestic product decreased by 11%, agriculture declined by 57% and trade by almost 30%.
“The Cuban economy is bankrupt... and the Cuban authorities are taking measures that do not favor a change in these trends,” said Omar Everleny Pérez, an economist based in Cuba.
The island's economic collapse is best illustrated by sugar production figures. Cuba, once known for being the main sugar producer in the world, is now forced to import it.
The latest sugar harvest, which began in 2024, produced less than 150,000 tons — the worst in more than 100 years, even smaller than when Cubans fighting the Spanish were burning sugarcane fields during the war for independence in the 19th century. Since 2019, sugar production has collapsed 87%, according to figures based on official data compiled by Pérez.
Crops of Cuban cuisine staples like rice are at a minimum. In 2023, the last figure available, Cuba produced just 57,766 tons of rice, down from over 700,000 in 2003. State companies produced only 42,000 tons of milk in 2023, less than during the “Special Period,” the economic crisis during the 1990s caused by the downfall of the Soviet empire.
The collapse of agricultural production has led to the end of one of the symbols of Castro’s revolution: Food ration cards. “The cards still exist, but you can’t get any products,” Pérez said.
The end of food subsidies have hit pensioners and those dependent on the country's welfare system the hardest. The government recently raised state monthly pensions to a maximum of 4,000 pesos, about $8.60, at a time when a carton of eggs sells for as much as 3,000 pesos in Havana, according to the National Statistics Office of Cuba.
In 2021 the price of a carton of eggs was 400 pesos, one of the signs that inflation has skyrocketed.
The consumer price index, a measure of inflation, has grown 487% over its 2010 value. That means, for example, that a family of two would need 51,798 pesos monthly, equivalent to $105, to cover food, transportation, clothing, personal care and internet expenses, according to a very conservative estimate presented by Pérez. The average monthly salary of a state worker is 6,685 pesos — about $14 — Cuba’s National Statistics Office said last week.
The crisis has been brewing for years, but the government has resisted any significant reforms out of fear of losing political control.
There was consensus among the economists gathered at FIU that the government needs to urgently enact much needed and overly delayed market-oriented reforms, even if they disagree on how far to go in a transition to capitalism.
And yet, the words “reform” or “change” do not appear in the 92 pages of the “Government program to correct distortions and reboot the economy,” a voluminous plan with more than 700 goals that Cuban authorities published ahead of Hurricane Melissa.
The words “to propose” — more plans, more new measures, more updated policies —appear 55 times in the document that reads at times as a rushed to-do-list written by a government bureaucrat. And yet, there is little actually new in the proposals, many of which have been already floated by the country’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero, including more austerity measures and cutting back the welfare system. Absent in the document is any revamp of the country’s laws to expand the private sector and attract foreign investment, or a sense of urgency to meet some of the population’s most pressing needs.
As is customary, the plan will now undergo several rounds of discussions.
Those affected by Melissa, however, need help immediately.
While delivering aid sent by his followers to those in need in Holguín, Norge Ernesto Díaz Blak, an influencer known as Noly Blak who has long documented extreme poverty in that eastern province, stopped to speak to a distressed, emaciated young mother with four children he found on the street in Cacocún. Her home was destroyed by the hurricane, she told him.
“What do you need?” he is heard asking in a video he posted on his social media account.
“I don’t want anything for me,” she replied. “What I need is food for my children.”
This story was originally published November 19, 2025 at 4:30 AM.
Nora Gámez Torres is the Cuba/U.S.-Latin American policy reporter for el Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald. She studied journalism and media and communications in Havana and London. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from City, University of London. Her work has won awards by the Florida Society of News Editors and the Society for Professional Journalists.//Nora Gámez Torres estudió periodismo y comunicación en La Habana y Londres. Tiene un doctorado en sociología y desde el 2014 cubre temas cubanos para el Nuevo Herald y el Miami Herald. También reporta sobre la política de Estados Unidos hacia América Latina. Su trabajo ha sido reconocido con premios de Florida Society of News Editors y Society for Profesional Journalists.
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