People walk on a street littered with debris after Hurricane Sandy hit Santiago de Cuba on Oct. 26, 2012.
Hurricane Sandy slammed into the east coast of the United States in late October, killing more than 100 people, cutting off power for millions more and causing damage estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. But with its effects in the U.S. widely documented, the storm’s destruction in the Caribbean went largely overshadowed.
In Haiti, a country still struggling to recover from a catastrophic earthquake in 2010, the storm dropped more than 20 inches of rain in 24 hours, killed 54 people and left more than 200,000 homeless. In the south of the country, 70 percent of crops were destroyed; the ensuing malnutrition and a cholera epidemic only added to Haiti’s miseries. All together, Sandy killed 70 people across the Caribbean — fewer victims than the storm claimed in the U.S., it’s true, but there was much less coverage of the agony in our neighbors to the south.