Smash hit

Trucks and dented school buses had ferried about 1,000 evacuees to shelter at an art school in Camaguey's outskirts, where classrooms were filled with metal bunk beds.

Mirtha Perez, a 65-year-old retiree, said hardly anyone was left in her nearby town of Salome. “It’s a huge evacuation,” she said. “We are waiting and asking God to protect us and that nothing happens to us.”

In Holguin province, roofs were ripped from many homes and trees brought down by winds as high as 160mph (260 kph).

Foreign tourists were pulled out from vulnerable beach communities, including more than 9,000 from the resort of Varadero, east of Havana. Workers tried to protect coffee plants and other crops, and plans were under way to distribute food and cooking oil to disaster areas.

Strong gusts and steady rains fell at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in southeast Cuba, where all ferries were tied up and beaches were off limits, but the base was spared the strongest winds. The military said that the cells containing the detainees, about 255 men suspected of links to the Taleban and al-Qaeda, are hurricane-proof.

Forecasters expect Ike to hit Havana, home to two million people, early tomorrow. This morning skies over the capital were only cloudy, but schools were closed and domestic flights were suspended.

On Florida’s Key West, tourists and residents alike were ordered to evacuate and a steady stream of traffic filled the highway from the island. Ike was forecast to make landfall later in the week somewhere between the Florida Panhandle and the Texas coast. New Orleans was once again in the firing line.

The hurricane slowed efforts to bring oil and gas production back online in the Gulf of Mexico following Hurricane Gustav.

Before the storm arrived in Cuba, Ike struck the low-lying Turks and Caicos and the southernmost Bahamas islands as a ferocious Category-4 hurricane, but thousands rode out the storm in shelters and there was no immediate word of deaths. Royal Navy ships were heading to the islands with relief supplies.

In flooded Haiti, however, Ike's winds and rain made an already grim situation abysmal, causing at least 58 deaths yesterday. Officials also found three more bodies from a previous storm, raising Haiti’s death toll from four tropical storms in less than a month to 319. A Dominican man was crushed by a falling tree.

Haiti’s coastal town of Cabaret was particularly hard hit. The bodies of 21 victims were stacked in a mud-caked pile in a funeral home, including two pregnant women, one with a dead girl still in her arms.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president