Since Hurricane Maria crashed through the Caribbean last month, most of the attention has focused on Puerto Rico. But smaller nearby islands were even harder hit. Especially Dominica. It was the first to feel Maria’s Category 5, 160-mph winds. They demolished the country, leaving 27 dead, 50 still missing – and the population of 71,000 still with little access to food, water and power.
Before Hurricane Irma ravaged Cuba’s north coast last month, Carla León’s private business – renting her family’s three-bedroom house in Havana through Airbnb – had already begun losing customers thanks to another force of nature: Donald Trump.
UPDATE: President Trump visited Puerto Rico on Tuesday and possibly heightened rather than diffused tensions between him and the U.S. island territory. He quipped that Puerto Rico's hurricane disaster had "thrown our budget a little out of whack. We've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico." Then he suggested the storm had not been a "real catastrophe" like Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He also lauded Puerto Rico for its low hurricane death toll compared to Katrina. President Trump plans to visit
Standing outside his church in Palmetto Bay on Sunday, Jesus Figueroa listened intently to information coming across his iPhone from Puerto Rico on Zello. The walkie-talkie app transmits messages on group channels when cell phone service is a challenge – and in Puerto Rico right now it’s an epic ordeal.
The Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda was the first country to be hit this month by the monster storm Hurricane Irma. Prime Minister Gaston Browne and most of his compatriots rode out the storm on Antigua island – then heard the horror stories of those who lived through a worse strike on Barbuda island. “This was a very horrendous situation in which many individuals felt they were going to die,” Browne told me from the capital, St. John’s. “One family had to use ropes to literally
Atlantic hurricanes rarely leave the Caribbean unscathed. The basin is like a bowling alley for storms and the islands its pins. Hurricane Irma – which left at least 36 people dead in the Caribbean last week, including 10 in Cuba, before roaring into Florida on Sunday – was an outsize bowling ball, setting strength records as it crashed into the Leeward Islands on the basin’s eastern fringe. Still, folks in the Caribbean say they’re feeling forgotten now that the Irma focus is on Florida and the
The official song commissioned for Pope Francis’ visit to Colombia this week is called “Let’s Take the First Step.” It concludes with a paso the 80-year-old pontiff probably isn’t too familiar with: the hip-hop beat called reggaeton. But the gritty rhythm is fitting. When the Roman Catholic pontiff steps off his plane in Bogotá on Wednesday for his five-day, four-city tour , he’ll walk into a country that just recently ended a 52-year-long civil war – a nation still so torn in half it might take
Latin America is still a low-tech place – and computer hackers are preying on it. Cybercrime cost Latin America and the Caribbean more than $100 billion last year, and the Inter-American Development Bank says it’s growing as much as 40 percent a year.
When Vice President Mike Pence toured Latin America last week – Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Panama – it was the Trump administration’s first visit to a region that's wondering if Trump has any interest in it besides building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The targets on the backs of Venezuelans like Gustavo Marcano grow larger by the day. Marcano is the mayor of the eastern Venezuelan city of Lechería. Like most places in Venezuela this year, Lechería has been the site of angry anti-government protests as the country’s economy collapses – and as its socialist regime morphs into what critics call a dictatorship. But because Marcano is an opposition mayor, that regime recently ordered his arrest for not stopping the protests in his city. In fact,
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About Latin America Report
From the publisher's feed
In South Florida, Latin America and the Caribbean are a local story - and the Latin America Report, which was a weekly WLRN feature from 2013 to 2023, looked at how the two often intersected and…
affected each other politically, economically and culturally. Its award-winning reports included the six-part Migration Maze series, which examined new U.S. policies to address illegal immigration at its source in Central America instead of at the border; the three-part series Escape From Venezuela, examining the Venezuelan refugee crisis in South America and Venezuelan exile efforts to alleviate it; and reporting from Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria 2017, which revealed how Florida Puerto Ricans essentially filled the aid needs that U.S. relief efforts couldn’t.