Guabancex (the hurricane)
Guabancex is the cemí of wind and storm in Ramón Pané’s account of the 1490s: a woman of stone who, when angry, raises the wind and rain and throws down houses. A round face with two spiralling arms, on a ceramic from eastern Cuba, is widely drawn today as her hurricane.
Meaning
Pané wrote that Guabancex belonged to a great cacique named Aumatex and was a woman, made of the stone of that country. When she is angry she raises the wind and brings rain, throws down houses and shakes the trees. Two cemís keep her company: Guatauva, a crier, who at her order proclaims that all the cemís of the province must help raise a high wind and heavy rain, and Coatrischie, who gathers the water in the valleys between the mountains and then lets it loose to destroy the country. The historian Stuart Schwartz calls her the mistress of the winds. In the Taíno movement today, Christina M. González writes, Guabancex is one of the manifestations of Atabey: chaos incarnate, but part of a cycle leading to new life and balance.
Origin and history
Pané was commissioned by Columbus during the second voyage (1493–96). The spiral-armed figure entered the story much later. The Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz pointed out in the 1940s ceramic images from eastern Cuba of a round face with spiralling arms pointing in opposite directions, and published a drawing of one in El huracán, su mitología y sus símbolos (1947). For Schwartz this is perhaps the most remarkable evidence of how well the Taíno knew hurricanes: it suggests they saw the winds circling an eye, which Western science did not establish until the mid-nineteenth century. Indian Country Today, in 2011, described the common modern picture as the angry face of Guabancex with arms flailing in an S-shape, close to the meteorologists’ hurricane symbol.
Is “hurricane” a Taíno word?
Smithsonian magazine counts hurricane, with hammock and tobacco, among the words credited to the Taíno; for González, words like hurakan are one of the ways the Taíno have survived. Schwartz is more cautious. The word does not appear in Pané, he notes, and is first used in Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia natural of 1526. He asks whether the likeness of the Taíno hurakan and the Maya Huracán is chance, kinship or contact, and allows that the word may have been applied to the islands only after the fact, once the Spanish had reached Mesoamerica.
Juracán
Indian Country Today’s 2011 article makes Juracán a god of chaos who sent the storms, with Guabancex doing the work. Pané names Guabancex, Guatauva and Coatrischie, and no Juracán.
Storm gods of the Maya
On the mainland, Schwartz notes, Maya in Quintana Roo still believe that hurricanes are a struggle between the kind and the harmful sides of Chaac.
Read next
- Next in Taíno symbolsTurtleIn a Taíno story Ramón Pané recorded in the 1490s, a live female turtle came out of a swelling on the back of Caracaracol, one of four brothers born together, and the brothers built their house and cared for her. Turtles are carved on Taíno seats and stones.
- Schwartz: Maya in Quintana Roo see hurricanes as a struggle between two sides of ChaakChaacThe Maya god of rain, thunder and lightning, drawn in the codices with a long, hanging nose and a lightning axe in his hand. Yucatec Maya farmers still hold the Ch’a Cháak ceremony to ask the chaacs for rain.
See also
Atabey (the Woman of Caguana), Taíno sun (Sol de Jayuya), Coquí (the frog), Zemí (cemí), Bat (opía, the spirits of the dead), Duho (ceremonial seat).
Sources
- Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, c. 1498 (Bourne’s translation, 1906), Edward Gaylord Bourne, “Columbus, Ramon Pane and the Beginnings of American Anthropology”, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, 1906: Pané’s account translated from Ulloa’s Italian text of 1571, with Eden’s 1555 English of Peter Martyr, American Antiquarian Society (Internet Archive), Bourne’s introduction; chapter XXIII
- Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms, chapter 1 (Princeton University Press), Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina, Princeton University Press, 2015, chapter 1, “Storms and Gods in a Spanish Sea” (publisher’s sample chapter), Princeton University Press, chapter 1, pp. 6–8 and figure 1.1
- Hurricane: From the Goddess Guabancex to Fierce Irene (ICT), ICT Staff, “Hurricane: From the Goddess Guabancex to Fierce Irene”, Indian Country Today, 27 August 2011, ICT (Indian Country Today), article text
- This Culture, Once Believed Extinct, Is Flourishing (Alex Palmer, Smithsonian), Alex Palmer, “This Culture, Once Believed Extinct, Is Flourishing”, Smithsonian magazine, 2018, Smithsonian magazine, article text
- Abuelas, Ancestors and Atabey: The Spirit of Taíno Resurgence (Christina M. González), Christina M. González, “Abuelas, Ancestors and Atabey: The Spirit of Taíno Resurgence”, American Indian magazine (National Museum of the American Indian), 2018, American Indian magazine (NMAI), article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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