A woman stands at the entrance of her makeshift home during heavy rains brought by the outer bands of Hurricane Melissa, at a shelter housing Haitians displaced by gang violence, in Port-au-Prince.Claudia Daut/Reuters
Hurricane Melissa left at least dozens dead and caused widespread destruction across Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica, where roofless homes, toppled utility poles and waterlogged furniture dominated the landscape Wednesday.
A landslide blocked the main roads of Santa Cruz in Jamaica’s St. Elizabeth parish, where the streets were reduced to mud pits. Residents swept water from homes as they tried to salvage belongings. Wind ripped off part of the roof at a high school that serves as a public shelter.
“I never see anything like this before in all my years living here,” resident Jennifer Small said.
The extent of the damage from the deadly hurricane was unclear Wednesday as widespread power outages and dangerous conditions persisted in the region.
“It is too early for us to say definitively,” said Dana Morris Dixon, Jamaica’s education minister.
Melissa made landfall Tuesday in Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane with top winds of 295 km/h, one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, before weakening and moving on to Cuba, but even countries outside the direct path of the massive storm felt its devastating effects.
At least 25 people have died across Haiti and 18 are missing, Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said in a statement Wednesday. Twenty of those reported dead and 10 of the missing are from a southern coastal town where flooding collapsed dozens of homes. At least eight are dead in Jamaica.
In Cuba, officials reported collapsed houses, blocked mountain roads and roofs blown off buildings Wednesday, with the heaviest destruction concentrated in the southwest and northwest. Authorities said about 735,000 people remained in shelters.
“That was hell. All night long, it was terrible,” said Reinaldo Charon in Santiago de Cuba. The 52-year-old was one of the few people venturing out Wednesday, covered by a plastic sheet in the intermittent rain.
Forecasters expect Melissa, now a Category 2 hurricane, to bring dangerous winds, flooding and storm surge to the Bahamas overnight into Thursday.
Hurricane Melissa unleashed devastation in Jamaica as the strongest storm on record ever to hit the Caribbean island nation before roaring into eastern Cuba.
Reuters
In Jamaica, more than 25,000 people were packed into shelters Wednesday after the storm ripped roofs off their homes and left them temporarily homeless. Dixon said 77 per cent of the island was without power.
The outages complicated assessing the damage because of “a total communication blackout” in areas, Richard Thompson, acting director general of Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management, told the Nationwide News Network radio station.
“Recovery will take time, but the government is fully mobilized,” Prime Minister Andrew Holness said in a statement. “Relief supplies are being prepared, and we are doing everything possible to restore normalcy quickly.”
Officials in Black River, Jamaica, a southwestern coastal town of approximately 5,000 people, pleaded for aid at a news conference Wednesday.
“Catastrophic is a mild term based on what we are observing,” Mayor Richard Solomon said.
Solomon said the local rescue infrastructure had been demolished by the storm. The hospital, police units and emergency services were inundated by floods and unable to conduct emergency operations.
Jamaican Transportation Minister Daryl Vaz said two of the island’s airports will reopen Wednesday to relief flights only, with U.N. agencies and dozens of nonprofits on standby to distribute basic goods.
“The devastation is enormous,” he said. “We need all hands on deck to recover stronger and to help those in need at this time.”
The United States is sending rescue and response teams to assist in recovery efforts in the Caribbean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X.
St. Elizabeth Police Superintendent Coleridge Minto told Nationwide News Network on Wednesday that authorities have found at least four bodies in southwest Jamaica. One death was reported in the west when a tree fell on a baby, state minister Abka Fitz-Henley told Nationwide News Network.
Before landfall, Melissa had already been blamed for three deaths in Jamaica, three in Haiti and one in the Dominican Republic.
Hurricane Melissa is moving across eastern Cuba as a Category 2 storm.
The Associated Press
Hurricane Melissa damaged more than 160 homes and destroyed 80 others in the town of Petit-Goâve, where 10 of the 20 people killed there were children, Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency said Wednesday.
Lawyer Charly Saint-Vil, 30, said he saw bodies lying among the debris after the storm as he walked the streets of the small coastal town where he grew up. People screamed as they searched for their missing children, he said.
“People have lost everything,” Saint-Vil said.
Although the immediate threat of the storm has passed, Saint-Vil said Petit-Goâve’s residents were living in fear about access to medicine, water and food in the coming days given the political instability in Haiti.
“We don’t know what will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” he said.
For now, neighbours are helping one another source necessities and find places to sleep. Saint-Vil is hosting a number of friends who lost their homes in his small apartment.
“What I can do, I will do it, but it’s not easy because the situation is really complicated for everyone,” he said.
A man walks under the rain before the arrival of Hurricane Melissa in Canizo, a village in Santiago de Cuba, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Ramón Espinosa)Ramon Espinosa/The Associated Press
People in the eastern Cuban province of Santiago de Cuba began clearing debris around the collapsed walls of their homes Wednesday after Melissa made landfall in the region hours earlier.
“Life is what matters,” Alexis Ramos, a 54-year-old fisherman, said as he surveyed his destroyed home and shielded himself from the intermittent rain with a yellow raincoat. “Repairing this costs money, a lot of money.”
Local media showed images of the Juan Bruno Zayas Clinical Hospital with severe damage: glass scattered across the floor, waiting rooms in ruins and masonry walls crumpled on the ground.
“As soon as conditions allow, we will begin the recovery. We are ready,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X.
The hurricane could worsen Cuba’s severe economic crisis, which already has led to prolonged power blackouts along with fuel and food shortages.
Cuba’s National Institute of Hydraulic Resources reported accumulated rainfall of 38 centimetres in Charco Redondo and 36 centimetres in Las Villas Reservoir.
Wednesday night, Melissa had top sustained winds near 155 km/h and was moving north-northeast at 33 km/h according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. The hurricane was centred about 170 kilometres east-northeast of the central Bahamas and about 1,285 kilometres southwest of Bermuda.
Authorities in the Bahamas were evacuating dozens of people from the archipelago’s southeast corner ahead of Melissa’s arrival. By late Thursday, Melissa is expected to pass just west of Bermuda.
Britain said on Wednesday it was deploying £2.5-million ($4.6-million) in emergency humanitarian funding to assist the Caribbean region’s recovery from Hurricane Melissa, with targeted support for Jamaica.
The aid package includes the rapid delivery of shelter kits, water filters, and blankets, the government said.
Melissa reached tropical storm status Oct. 21 and became a hurricane on Saturday. It rapidly intensified into a Category 5 hurricane early Monday.
Climate scientists have linked warming ocean temperatures to hurricanes intensifying more quickly. Abnormally warm ocean waters of about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above normal helped double Hurricane Melissa’s wind speed in less than 24 hours, scientists said.
Warmer temperatures also give hurricanes fuel to unleash more rain.
Scientists said Melissa is the fourth storm in the Atlantic this year to undergo rapid intensification. Storms that ramp up so quickly complicate forecasting and make it harder for government agencies and nonprofits to plan for emergencies.
With a report from Reuters