If the month of May is any indicator, a long and very hot northern summer awaits Cuba, says Havana native Osmel Valdés, a horse-drawn buggy driver.
For this 52-year-old Havana native, who walks the stifling streets of the Cuban capital, it is difficult to find shade in the urban environment, so he places a piece of cardboard on top of his horse to give him a break between rides.
“This month has been horribly hot,” he told Reuters.
In the capital and throughout the island nation, summer has arrived almost two months earlier than usual, worsened by annoying blackouts that last for hours and amid fuel shortages and power plant failures.
With night temperatures as high as 27 degrees Celsius (80 Fahrenheit) and daytime temperatures exceeding 35°C, there is no escape, local residents say.
Ramón Pérez, a meteorologist who works for the Cuban Climate Center, is still crunching the numbers, but May appears to be the warmest month on the Caribbean island since 1951, when local records began.
“Cuba’s climate is gradually becoming warmer and warmer especially in summers,” Pérez told Reuters.
Last summer, he said, was the hottest ever recorded, while this one is already on its way to equally stifling high temperatures, a phenomenon the meteorologist attributes to global warming.
The increasing frequency and intensity of severe weather conditions, both on land and in the oceans, is a symptom of human-driven global climate change that is fueling extremes, experts say.
The El Niño climate phenomenon, which began to weaken in March, has also continued to cause above-average land and sea temperatures around the world.
That has left Cuba, which sits at the stormy intersection of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, exceptionally exposed to a hurricane season that is expected to be among the worst in history.
The Cuban Climate Center maintains that there is an 80% probability that at least one hurricane will hit the Caribbean island during this season.
Meanwhile, U.S. government forecasters said last week that up to seven major hurricanes could form in an “extraordinary” season of 2024 Atlantic events beginning June 1.
The stifling heat is combined in Cuba with a devastating economic crisis, a double blow that has already exhausted Cubans like Nelson Jadier, a sweat-soaked 28-year-old who works in a restaurant courting customers from the sidewalk.
“May has been a stifling month for those of us who have to work on the streets to put food on the table,” Jadier said.
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