October Surprises

Ushered in with the rampage of Hurricane Matthew, later days brightened in this month that has often been harbinger of both good and bad news for Cuba and the world. Hurricane Matthew ripped through Eastern Cuba, devastating the historic town of Baracoa (Cuba's first capital, founded in 1511) and the village of Maisí, where the morning sun first rises over Cuban territory. Wind and flood leveled hundreds of homes, brought down the power grid and destroyed crops. Yet there was no loss of human life, unlike in neighboring Haiti and other countries in Matthew's path, and unlike in Cuba in 1963, when Hurricane Flora caused more than 1200 deaths. In Haiti, efforts of health workers-including hundreds of Haitian graduates from Cuba's Latin American Medical School and 600 Cuban health professionals already there-were bolstered by dozens of specially trained Cuban disaster medical personnel in the wake of the storm.