By Maria Tsvetkova, Helen Coster and Aleksandra Michalska

NEW YORK (Reuters) -New York chef Kemoy Gordon last spoke to his cousin in Jamaica on Monday, as his family prepared to leave their beachside home on the western part of the Caribbean island ahead of Hurricane Melissa. That was the last time he made contact with them.

“I haven’t heard from them since. The phone line is off, the electricity is off. I can’t get in contact with anybody down there,” said Gordon, 34, who works in a Jamaican bakery in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. “I don’t know what’s going on and don’t know how they are affected.”

Gordon is among the roughly 218,000 New York City residents with Jamaican roots, many of whom are worried about friends and loved ones in their homeland, battered this week by the st

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