By Roberto Morejón

Since last weekend, Cubans have been a little more prepared to face weather and other contingencies, such as technological, sanitary and accident-related ones, by carrying out, as they usually do every year, a new popular rehearsal.
 
Although the country's material shortages, mainly due to the U.S. blockade, make it impossible to give a greater magnitude to the drill, Cubans did not miss the opportunity to put into practice the national exercise Meteoro 2023.
 
Increasing the perception of risks, preventing, mitigating the inevitable effects of disasters of any kind and contributing to the protection of people and resources of the economy, are among the purposes now fulfilled in the country.
 
In the provinces, local people and managers and employees of state institutions, cooperatives and private companies were seen participating, among other tasks, in the construction insurance of buildings, a valuable task especially in the face of the threat of tropical cyclones.
 
Although the next season of these meteorological events that begins in June is expected, according to experts, to be normal to not very active, nobody here plays with this type of scourge, given the disastrous occurrence in the national reality.
 
The country is still allocating inputs to the restoration of the housing fund in the western province of Pinar del Rio, hit on September 27, 2022 by the destructive Hurricane Ian, whose impact was remarkable despite the forecasts adopted.
 
However, it would be a mistake to educate only about the risk of cyclones because other adversities such as forest fires, droughts and accidents can be unleashed.
 
The Cubans proposed, precisely, to further study the experiences derived from negative events, such as those related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the fires at the Saratoga Hotel in Havana and at the supertanker terminal in the western province of Matanzas.
 
Generalizing the lessons learned from those traumatic mishaps is the purpose of the Meteoro exercises, an initiative established in 1986 and which fortunately came to stay.
 
Cuba, with 68 percent of its territory nowadays affected by meteorological drought, needs to be increasingly trained to face this and other types of contingencies, hence the urgency of applying Marti's maxim: "in foreseeing lies the art of saving".