Cubans To Farewell 2022 with Coats and Scarves

It’s been several years since Cubans have been waiting for the new year in short sleeves and tight, but everything seems to indicate that this one it’s going to be something different, as different has been this 2022 that is already ending.

It’s that so, that these days a drop in temperatures is expected to the lowest values of the current winter season on the Island.

However, the severe winter conditions must prevail until mid-week, according to Granma newspaper Miriam Teresita Llanes, PhD in Sciences, head of the Forecast Center of the Institute of Meteorology.

Although it hasn’t been a tendency throughout the national territory "a hellish cold” in yearend, that does not forget there were important temperature drops at the end and beginning of the most recent year.

For example, in the early hours of the last day of January of this year, the Bainoa station, in Mayabeque, recorded a singular minimum of 2.8 C°.

Even frost was seen then in that area. In this regard, Dr. José Rubiera commented that "on the surface or very close to it, temperature must have dropped to zero degrees, because this is the only way to explain the formation of this natural phenomenon."

In other areas of the national territory, the temperatures drop at the beginning of the previous year. So much so that during that day 3.2 degrees were registered at José Martí international airport; 3.5 in Unión de Reyes and 3.7 in Tapaste.

The cold fronts appearing in the Caribbean have nothing to do with the fearsome bomb cyclone in various geographies of the planet.

In the US, for example, this Christmas they suffered the biggest cold wave in

40 years, leaving that nation practically paralyzed where, at the moment, there were 22 deaths due to icy temperatures, and 3.9 million people remained on alert during Christmas for snowstorms.

Heavy snowfall, blizzards, flooding at points on the northeast coast, accompanied that fateful Christmas Eve in the northern nation, which has suffered temperatures up to - 50 C°, a million homes without electricity, highways closed and thousands of travelers stranded in crowded airports.

A bulletin from the US National Weather Service reached

Warn that "In some areas, being outdoors could lead to frostbite within minutes."

This explosive cold wave from arctic origin is also hitting Canada and, in the south, to other countries like Mexico. In that land of Central America, the thermometers marked in some locations up to minus 15 degrees centigrade, with a wind chill of minus 20.

And if even fountains and monuments have frozen, what to say about the migrants who remain outdoors in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, fearing to go to a shelter or reception center for fear of being deported.

In Cuba, my colleague Orfilio Peláez recalled that one of the testimonies referring to the presumed existence of temperatures below zero degrees was left in 1800 by Baron Alejandro de Humboldt, when he mentioned in his notes that he saw "frost" in places near Havana.

Also observations made by the Cuban scholar Andrés Poey y Aguirre (pioneer of scientific meteorology in Cuba), and cited by Peláez, referred to the existence of frost during the winter of 1845, no less than in the hot Santiago de Cuba.

Questioned by *CubaSí*, via Facebook, the professor and researcher Luis

Enrique Ramos, historian of Meteorology on our Island, assures that here the occurrence of a snowfall “is absolutely false. There’s no data that support that statement in any part of Cuba.”

In any case, Cubans are already dusting off little coats and overcoats, scarves, hats and even gloves, with which they hope to shake hands in the new year, trusting that, although beginning cold, it will be better.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff