The same thing happens every year. And yet, every time it happens, it seems like the first time. The Caribbean becomes a landing strip for atmospheric monsters that roll in from the Atlantic as if they know exactly where human weaknesses lie, which cities are ill-prepared, which coasts lack infrastructure, which governments don’t function, and which people have no way to protect themselves. They are called Beryl, Irma, Maria, Katrina, Mitch. They have human names, but they bring with them a violence that knows no metaphors.
They form off the coast of Africa, in a corner of the map no tourist knows, where the hot, humid wind begins to spin. No one orders them, but they seem to have a destiny. They cross the ocean in a straight line, absorb heat from the sea, grow stronger with an uncontrollable thirst, and, once in the Caribbean, they explode. That’s what meteorological science tells us. But what science can’t explain is why some hurricanes behave as if they were selective. Why do some people make absurd turns and come back as if they forgot something? Why do certain countries seem protected by some strange force while others take the full brunt?
Entire towns swear that “the hurricane veered because someone asked for it.” Others claim that “the mountain stopped it.” And although climatologists scoff, they have no better answers. In Puerto Rico, they still remember how Hurricane Georges tore through the island in 1998 like a hot knife, but just before reaching San Juan, it weakened. Some say it was a miracle. Others, that it was a coincidence. No one explains it precisely. And that is exactly what makes it a mystery.
We are not just talking about natural phenomena. We are talking about a pattern of destruction with its own logic. A cyclical and targeted violence. Meteorologists call it “cyclone season,” which is a fancy way of saying “time of foretold catastrophes.” Because the Caribbean has no seasons. It has rituals. And one of them begins every year in June, when the sea temperature reaches 27 degrees and the currents begin to shift. That’s when everyone—from Havana to Cartagena, from Kingston to Cancún—knows something is coming, even if it doesn’t yet have a name.
Governments hold press conferences. Televisions show maps with colorful swirls. Bottles of water are handed out, candles are collected, roofs are checked. But no one, absolutely no one, can be sure what will happen. And that’s the most terrifying thing about it. Hurricanes are warnings, but also puzzles. They allow time to evacuate, but not to understand. And after their passage, there is silence. The smell of mud. The roofless houses. The death toll, always updated slowly, as if embarrassing.
Climate change, they say, is making them more intense. Less frequent, but more lethal. In practice, that means fewer warnings and more explosions. Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 and left the country without power for months. Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 and starkly revealed the structural racism in disaster management. Mitch remained static over Central America in 1998, as if trying to wipe Honduras off the map. And the list goes on. These aren’t just climate events. They are X-rays of a political, economic, and social system completely in ruins.
And yet, something persists: the people. The collective memory. The culture of the survivor. The Caribbean, despite everything, rises again every year. It rebuilds. It dances. It prays. And it prepares for the next blow. Not because it believes it will avoid it, but because it knows it will come.
There are those who scoff at those who see patterns in hurricanes. But what if that weren’t entirely absurd? What if hurricanes are more than just storms? What if they are the meteorological mirror of our failures, our negligence, our historical debts to the environment and the poorest?
Satellites may still track the path of each storm. But in the Caribbean neighborhoods, people don’t need maps to know when something strange is approaching. The sea tells them so. The wind changes. The animals flee. And the grandmothers look at the sky. With the certainty of someone who has already seen disaster, lived it, and still got up the next day to heat coffee.
Hurricanes in the Caribbean are not climatic phenomena. They are warnings. They are prophecies that repeat themselves with cosmic punctuality and geographical cruelty. Year after year, as if obeying an ancient script, tropical storms born off the coast of Africa travel across the Atlantic, gathering their fury in the warm waters of the Caribbean, and mercilessly battering the islands and coasts of Central America, Mexico, and the southern United States. But what exactly are we talking about? Are they natural events or symptoms of a larger anomaly that we still don’t understand?
The Geography of Perpetual Punishment
The Caribbean region—stretching from the Greater and Lesser Antilles to the coasts of Yucatán, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela—is the preferred highway for Atlantic hurricanes. This is no coincidence. The perfect combination of warm waters, easterly trade winds, high humidity, and an unstable atmosphere create the breeding ground for the birth of cyclonic monsters with their own names.
The mystery, however, lies not in its origin, which is well documented by meteorological science. The mystery lies in its erratic behavior. Hurricanes veer off course for no apparent reason, storms that intensify in a matter of hours, paths that defy all forecasts. Some experts have begun to speak of a new weather pattern. Others, more daring, call it “atmospheric intelligence.”
Timeline of devastation: when history repeats itself, but worse
To understand the present, we must look at the disaster archive:
San Ciriaco (1899): More than 3,000 dead in Puerto Rico. It was the deadliest in modern Caribbean history.
Gilbert (1988): It devastated Jamaica and part of the Yucatán Peninsula with winds of up to 295 km/h.
Mitch (1998): Its slow and destructive path left more than 11,000 dead between Nicaragua and Honduras. It was so devastating that the name was retired.
Maria and Irma (2017): A double blow that destroyed infrastructure in Puerto Rico, Antigua, and Barbuda, and left millions without power for months.
Every decade has its monster. Every season, its threat. But the last 20 years have been particularly intense, as if the climate had decided to accelerate its revenge.
Climate change or geographical curse?
The theories are many. The answers are few. What we do know is that the rising temperature in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea has created more favorable conditions for more intense hurricanes. That is, fewer hurricanes, but more powerful ones.
The curious thing is that the Caribbean, despite being one of the most vulnerable areas, is also one of the least polluting. This fact makes the region a victim of a climate crime it didn’t commit. The poor pay for the sins of the rich.
“We are islands condemned to disappear, not because of hurricanes, but because of the indifference of the industrial world,” said the Prime Minister of Barbados at the UN Climate Summit in 2019. She said it with fury. And with good reason.
The Unexplainable: Anomalies in Patterns
There’s an esoteric element surrounding these events. They don’t mention it in scientific papers, but it’s whispered by fishermen, elders, and those who observe the sky with empirical wisdom. “When the sun turns red and the sea smells of rust, something big is coming,” they say in the Dominican Republic.
And then there are the hurricanes that seem to avoid certain areas as if something invisible were deflecting them. Or those that spin and turn back. Or those that suddenly die out, as if someone had taken their power away.
Is there something beyond science at work in the Caribbean? Some climate astronomers have begun to study correlations between sunspots, seismic activity in the Puerto Rico Trench, and El Niño cycles. Others simply acknowledge that many pieces still don’t fit.
The Future: Submerged Cities and Maps Being Redrawn
The projection is clear and apocalyptic. If the trend continues, several coastal areas of the Caribbean will no longer be habitable by 2050. Key West in Florida, parts of Havana, sections of the Haitian coast, and the northern region of Venezuela could be submerged under the sea.
It’s not just winds. It’s storm surges, torrential rains, massive human displacement, and the gradual extinction of island culture as we know it.
Governments talk about resilience. Scientists demand data. People only have faith. Every hurricane season, they pray, pack their bags, and watch the radar as if observing the face of God on a satellite screen.
The Caribbean is a region with memory. And that memory knows that hurricanes are not just storms: they are symbols of a world collapsing due to excessive consumption, ecological indifference, and global inequality.
Perhaps one day we’ll fully understand their logic. Perhaps never. But the truth is that as long as hurricanes continue to visit the Caribbean, we must not only prepare better, but also ask ourselves why and why they return.
Could it be that nature, like any wounded mother, no longer gives warnings but punishments?
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