Narrative
Cry Wolf: The Story of Hurricane Hattie
Milton Arana · 1993
Synopsis
The account of Hurricane Hattie, which struck the coast just south of Belize City on 31 October 1961, with a storm surge of more than four metres on a city built at sea level. Catalogues list it among the history books of Belize; a historian of a Church present in the country uses it to tell what happened in the city. Warnings issued the day before had made it possible to evacuate the most exposed districts; the hurricane nevertheless destroyed a large part of the capital.
Context
The book was published in 1993 in New York by Vantage Press, in fifty-six pages. Hurricane Hattie, the strongest of the 1961 season, had struck a town of thirty-one thousand inhabitants protected only by a small seawall and a strip of marshland. Arana's account serves as a source for the history of the Salvation Army in the Caribbean, published in 2012. Four years after this book, the author collected his first poems under the title Belizean Breezes.
Who it is for
A short narrative in English, for those who want to learn about the catastrophe that marked colonial Belize in the early sixties.
Prizes and reception
Allen Satterlee cites it in 2012 to describe Belize City in the aftermath of the hurricane.