"I don't want anything, all I want is food for the children." With that sentence, a young mother from the municipality of Cacocum in the province of Holguín summed up her despair after losing everything during Hurricane Melissa's passage through eastern Cuba.
The testimony was captured in a video posted on TikTok by activist Noly Blak, who travels through the affected areas documenting the situation of the affected families.
In the recording, the woman, visibly exhausted and desperate, responds sorrowfully to the activist's questions.
"What do you need, dear?" Noly Blak asks her. "Food, that's what I need for the kids," the mother replies, as the video shows the four little children accompanying her.
The woman explains that her home, located in Peralta, was completely destroyed.
"The little house was left in ruins," she says, and recounts that she lost the mattresses and nearly all her belongings after the floods.
Despite the extent of the damage, it has not been evacuated and apparently has not received any state assistance either.
"It got flooded there in my little house, you see. And the mattresses and all that got ruined," he recounts.
In response to the question about what else is needed, he insists: “I don’t want anything, all I want is food”.
The hurricane Melissa caused severe damage in the eastern part of the country, with thousands of homes affected, impassable roads, and destroyed crops.
Holguín was one of the hardest-hit provinces, along with Granma, Las Tunas, and Santiago de Cuba.
While the authorities focus their reports on "recovery actions", testimonies like that of this mother reveal the precariousness and neglect that many rural families experience as they continue to await assistance.
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