Hours before Hurricane Melissa makes landfall in Jamaica, Cuban neurologist Mavis Aime Casamajor, who resides in Montego Bay, turned on her camera and spoke to her followers on her YouTube channel Life of a Cuban in Jamaica.
He said it in a calm voice, although his gaze mixed concern and faith. “No God can stop it,” he said, referring to the cyclone slowly moving over the Caribbean with sustained winds exceeding 200 kilometers per hour.
While authorities in Jamaica were ramping up alerts from Kingston to Negril, Mavis was finishing her shift at the hospital where she works and was sharing with her followers how she was getting ready.
She recounted buying water, bread, cookies, rice, and some chicken "just in case the power goes out." She remembered that when she lived in Cuba, Hurricane Sandy left her without electricity for 14 days. "I wouldn't want my family to go through that again," she said.
Melissa, which reached Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, had already struck the Dominican Republic with heavy rains and was moving toward the east of Cuba, where the provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Granma, and Guantánamo remain under meteorological surveillance.
Meteorologists that the cyclone could become the most powerful to make landfall in Jamaica since records began, even surpassing the historic Hurricane Gilbert of 1988.
In the midst of that threat, the neurologist expressed her anguish for her loved ones: “My people are there, in the east… Cuba is already in misery and calamity, and this adds more pressure on them.”
Between one weather report and another, Mavis also spoke about everyday matters, including her fear for her son Angelo, who was deployed with the maintenance crew of a hotel to face the hurricane; the tree that threatens to fall on her house; and her wish to celebrate her birthday, scheduled for Friday, even if it’s “soaked and swept by the cyclone.”
Before saying goodbye, he showed the blue sky of Jamaica and expressed his hope that the hurricane would weaken. "Material things can be replaced; life cannot. I pray to God for my own and for all Cubans, wherever they are."
In her testimony, Mavis not only spoke about the fear of Melissa, but also about the invisible bond that connects those who have emigrated with the island they left behind: a blend of nostalgia, resilience, and hope that no hurricane can erase.
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