Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Alexandra Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture. It is with both a heavy and hopeful heart that our episode today centers on the recent events and impact of Hurricane Melissa. The last few weeks have been tremendously difficult, with despair and worry weighing on many of us, but I've personally found strength in how we have rallied together as an international community in Melissa's wake. What's happening right now in the region isn't just another hurricane season story. On October 28th of this year, Hurricane Melissa made landfall on western Jamaica with winds of 185 miles per hour. The Category 5 hurricane also devastated multiple territories across the region, including Haiti, Cuba, Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic, just to name a few, with speeds exceeding most hurricanes in our recent history. Melissa is now tied with the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane as the strongest Atlantic hurricane landfall ever recorded. Melissa for one is the strongest hurricane to ever hit Jamaica, surpassing the previous record holder, Hurricane Gilbert, in 1988, which hit as a category four. The numbers are still coming in, but it's reported that of close to 100 lives have been lost across the region. In Jamaica alone, many of the affected areas are still without power. The storm brought up to 30 inches of rain in some parts of the island, with storm surges reaching 14 feet. The Prime Minister has declared Jamaica a disaster area per the Disaster Risk Management Act, allowing the government the authority to prioritize life-saving actions and policies. In addition to the damage in Jamaica, Hurricane Melissa also displaced over 735,000 people in Cuba, destroyed over 12,000 homes in Haiti, and caused flooding and storm surges in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos. Natural disasters have always shaped the Caribbean, but in many lesser-known ways, Caribbean people have also left our imprint on these disasters as well. Hurricanes have influenced migration patterns, agricultural change, and political decisions. They've also shaped memory, carved deeply into how Caribbean people understand vulnerability, survival, and collective strength. Hurricanes have been so entrenched in our history that the word hurricane itself can be traced back to indigenous Caribbean spirituality and cosmology. The Taino and Kalinago word hurrican both refer to a spirit or deity of storms and chaos, not unlike the Maya god hurricane or the concept of supernatural forces tied to wind and water. When the Spanish arrived, they adopted the Taino word into Huracan. The English later adopted it into the word we know today, hurricane. So even linguistically, Caribbean people, specifically indigenous Caribbean people, gave the world the word for one of nature's most powerful forces. There is something profound in the fact that we named the storm. We have endured the storm and we continue to rebuild after them. Additionally, the study of hurricane forecasting is deeply tied to the region. The first real hurricane warning system was established in Cuba in the early 1870s by a Jesuit priest named Father Benito Vinias. As director of the Meteorological Observatory at the Royal College of Belén in Havana, he created a network of observation sites throughout Cuba and established communication with other Caribbean islands using undersea telegraph cables. Vinias studied cloud patterns, barometric pressure, and wind direction. He was essentially doing what meteorologists do today, but with 19th century technology. And on September 11, 1875, he made what's considered the first hurricane forecast, warning that a storm in the Eastern Caribbean would hit Cuba the next day. His track prediction wasn't perfect, he was slightly off, but his revolutionary work gave people warning. The U.S. went on to develop their hurricane forecasting system more than two decades later, eventually collaborating with Cuba's service, which by that time was employing Viñez's methods. For many people across the region, hurricanes and hurricane season are not only deeply emotional, but they are political and historical events marked in memories forever. In the last 25 years alone, Hurricanes Ivan, Irma, Maria, and Beryl are just a few that have left an indelible mark on islands like Grenada, Puerto Rico, Barbuda, Dominica, and the Cayman Islands, to name a few. For many Jamaicans, especially those who grew up in the 1980s, Hurricane Gilbert remains a defining collective memory. People remember zinc roofs flying, the sound of wind like roaring spirits, days without electricity, and the ways communities pulled together with food and help. Having listened to the members of my own family, it feels like everyone has a Gilbert story. Some remember it with humor, like the song Wild Gilbert by Loving Dear, but beneath that humor was fear, uncertainty, and eventually resilience. Gilbert sits in Caribbean memory the way Katrina sits in American memory. It reminds Jamaicans and the world of the power of nature and vulnerability created by poor infrastructure, under-resourced state services, and geographical precarity. Melissa joins that lineage, not to replicate trauma, but to remind us that storms in the Caribbean are never simply natural disasters. They are markers in our memory and live realities for decades to come. Hurricane Melissa's path resonates deeply because it is both familiar and uniquely painful. We witnessed massive flooding, infrastructure collapse, lives lost, communities devastated, and presently trying to survive before we can even consider what it means to rebuild. It pains me to have even looked on social media and seen places that I grew up walking in the streets of St. Elizabeth, gone and decimated in the wake of the hurricane. In the few weeks since, we have seen tremendous commitment though. People risking their own lives to save others, diaspora families glued to WhatsApp, neighbors sharing supplies, phone chargers, hope, international support as aid from nonprofits, NGOs, and neighboring states come in. Melissa forces us to confront a recurring truth. The Caribbean has always been at the front lines of climate disaster, despite contributing almost nothing to the emissions causing them. This is a story we've heard before of our plantation economies ravaged modern global capitalism driving climate change, and yet we continue to pay the price. And even still, we move, we rebuild, and we restore. In light of everything that I've seen on social media, I also want to touch on something I've noticed before and after the storm and have seen some conflicting responses to. Humor is a Caribbean coping mechanism, in the same way that the song Wild Gilbert functions to provide some reflections and some humor on the hurricane. Famous producer Stephen Eugenious McGregor also posted a short snippet of a song on social media about Melissa, urging everyone to stay safe while also using some sounds of a popular meme. It is cultural therapy in many ways to do things like this: storytelling, deflection, and release. It is a survival tactic used since slavery and colonialism, a form of black joy and freedom, even in uncertainty. The laughter does not mean we don't care. It means we feel deeply and we cope creatively. It means we will not surrender our spirit to fear. This is just part of who we are. I also want to take a moment to reflect on what this moment has meant for the diaspora. Watching Melissa from afar has been hard, especially as we've waited to hear from family on the ground. There is a particular kind of anxiety that those of us in the diaspora know, refreshing messages to make sure family is safe, hoping power comes back soon, checking community WhatsApp chats, holding our breath through every voice note. It is a complicated position to be in, loving home from afar, and I have seen many of us respond by organizing donations, gathering supplies, and amplifying the importance of collective action on our platforms. In this moment, while I know we will rebuild, I know that we have, because we've done it time and time again, I also want to acknowledge the hurt and pain we are feeling. For me to see my own grandmother's house in an Instagram reel posted by the Prime Minister before I even heard from family was hard. And I am in many groups with people still waiting to hear back from their loved ones. I know there is a tremendous amount of pain in this moment, but we will rise. Lastly, I could not end this episode, of course, without a call to action. As we honor our history and our emotions, we must also act. Recovery is ongoing, and our islands need our support immediately and in the months ahead. If you have the ability, please consider donating to many of the relief organizations working directly on the ground. I will include a list of some of them in my show notes, as well as links in our bio and online on our website to some of these relief organizations assisting with food, shelter, and rebuilding efforts and long-term support, and have been reposting many of them on social media as well. Beyond donating, here's what we can all do: share the links with your networks, support Caribbean-based environmental organizations, advocate for climate justice and global accountability, and remember that disaster response is not only emergency relief, but long-term rebuilding and policy change. Our region deserves not just recovery, but protection, investment, and dignity. In closing, thank you for being here, for caring about our region, and for standing in community with Caribbean people everywhere. May we continue to honor our history, uplift each other, and remember, we have weathered storms before, we will again, and we will survive together. Until next time, stay safe, stay informed, and stay connected. Lickle more. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit StrictlyFactsPodcast.com for more information from each episode. Follow us at Strictly Facts Pod on Instagram and Facebook and at Strictly Facts PD on Twitter.