Resilience: Second Nature in Cuba
“Dealing with hardships is second nature to Cubans. It is the character and spirit of the Cuban people to “get on with it” without complaining.”
Hurricane season in the Caribbean spans between June and November. One never really knows how many will a season bring—there are years, sometimes even two, three, or four years in a row, with no hurricanes at all. Then there are years with multiple tropical storms with some of them turning into hurricanes. 2008 was the most destructive hurricane season ever recorded in Cuba’s history. The island was struck by one tropical storm and three hurricanes, with three of the storms hitting Cuba within a span of four weeks.
All images in this gallery © Sven Creutzmann
First there was Gustav, a category-4 hurricane that struck on August 30th, mostly in Cuba’s Isle of Youth. Then came Ike, a category-3 hurricane that hit on the eastern coast and went crawling along the axis of Cuba, leaving behind a trail of devastation. Finally, on November 8th, Paloma touched eastern Cuba again just as the provinces were recovering from the prior assaults.
In 2008, I traveled to eastern Cuba twice, first in September after Ike and then in November again after Paloma. I did not plan or want to take pictures of the actual hurricanes, rather wanted to portray the people within what was left. I took a soft studio umbrella light with me to emphasize the people in contrast to the surrounding destruction. What I experienced there in 2008 is what I have seen over and over again in Cuba — an incredible and admirable level of resilience.
All images in this gallery © Sven Creutzmann
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. While other Caribbean nations count hundreds and thousands of dead following such storms, Cuba has developed a highly effective system of evacuating people. So, even though material damage to houses, streets, and agriculture is immense, very few casualties emerge. Lastly, dealing with hardships is second nature to Cubans. It is the character and spirit of the Cuban people to “get on with it” without complaining. Resilience — most dictionaries of the world define the word as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. In Cuba, one sees it truly come to life—get up on your feet and start to rebuild.
