“This will take months, years, before we are at all close to our normal appearance,” she said.

But before the rebuilding of the tourism industry could begin, officials said, there were many immediate emergencies to attend to, like restoring telephone and electricity service, providing safe drinking water and medical treatment, and reopening the port and the airport.

Barbuda, with about 100 hotel rooms, has been a small contributor to the region’s overall tourism economy. But the businesspeople and workers who have depended on that trickle of tourists now face an uncertain future.

“All the hotels have been damaged significantly,” Trevor Walker, a former member of Parliament, said Monday. “This is going to take years. We have to rebuild an island, rebuild an economy.”

In Cuba, the long-term implications could be even worse. The hardest-hit parts of the islands contain a significant share of its tourist infrastructure and bring in precious foreign currency for the communist nation. Without that, the country loses one of its primary sources of income to purchase items on the global market, including the construction materials it will need to repair the damaged infrastructure.

The storm badly damaged dozens of hotels on Cayo Coco and Cayo Romero, small islands off the north coast of Cuba. The airport that served these islands was destroyed.

On Monday, President Raúl Castro recognized the importance of resorts to the Cuban economy and promised they would be rebuilt before the start of the peak season, which runs from December to April. The target is ambitious, but with Venezuela, the island’s main economic partner, racked by its own crises, Cuba can’t afford to miss it. The Cuban government announced on Monday that 10 people had died as a result of the storm, bringing the death toll in the Caribbean to at least 37.

The hurricane’s impact was felt broadly across all economic sectors. While the Bahamas generally avoided the worst of the destruction, the Morton Salt company, on Inagua, suffered significant damage to its production plant, where it employs 145 workers and is the main economic driver.