"NIQUERO, Cuba - Jutting into the Caribbean Sea like a boxer's chin, this area of small towns and sugar cane fields near Cuba's southernmost point looks like a target no hurricane could miss.

Yet for several generations, this coastal pocket on the lee side of the Sierra Maestra seemed immune from harm.

"The mountains protected us," said life-long resident Hector Martinez, 67, recalling how tempest after tempest was either deflected or robbed of its punch.

But last July, for the first time in memory, a major storm roared up the Jamaica Channel, cracked the glass in the Cabo Cruz lighthouse, and raked the promontory with winds as high as 145 mph.

Hurricane Dennis killed 16 people in Cuba, including 13 in Granma province, and destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of homes in a nation already reeling under a housing crisis.

Now, on the cusp of another hurricane season predicted to be as busy as the last, many local residents living in barely patched-up houses admit that last July's Category 4 storm shredded a sense of invulnerability that once sustained them.