Havana: Unlike Haiti, no one killed in Cuba as result of Gustav

By Will Weissert, The Associated Press

HAVANA — Cubans returned from shelters to find flooded homes and washed-out roads Sunday, but no deaths were reported after a monstrous Hurricane Gustav roared across the island and into the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.

Gustav hit the Isla de la Juventud south of the Cuban mainland just short of a topscale Category 5 hurricane with screaming 140 mph winds that toppled telephone poles and fruit trees, shattered windows and leveled some homes.

Authorities evacuated 250,000 residents nationwide. In Pinar del Rio, the western tobaccoproducing region, highways were blocked by fallen trees and downed power lines, and all public transportation ground to a halt.

Officials measured gusts of 212 mph in the western town of Paso Real del San Diego — a new national record for maximum wind speed in a country often hit by major hurricanes, said Miguel Angel Hernandez of the Cuban Institute of Meteorology.

A Cuban television reporter on the Isla de la Juventud said the storm had felt like “the blast wave from a bomb.”

“Buildings without windows, without doors,” he said. “Few trees remain standing.”

Cuban Civil defense chief Ana Isa Delgado said there were “many people injured” on the Isla de la Juventud, an island of 87,000 people whose name means Isle of Youth. Nearly all of its roads were washed out, and some regions were heavily flooded.

Gustav earlier killed 94 people by triggering floods and landslides in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Jamaica’s Emergency Management office on Sunday raised Gustav’s death toll there to 10 from seven.

But in Cuba, none of the reported injuries were lifethreatening.

In the fishing town of Batabano, 30 miles south of Havana, evacuees with children and dogs in tow returned to their pastelcolored, wooden homes to find many surrounded by knee-deep water.

“My house is full of water,” said Aldo Tomas, 43, pulling palm branches from his living room. “But we expected more. We expected worse.”

Gustav weakened slightly after crossing Cuba to a Category 3 status Sunday. But it still packed top winds near 115 mph, and forecasters predicted it would increase to a Category 4 before making landfall today along the U.S. Gulf coast.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Hanna weakened slightly as it swirled toward the Turks and Caicos Islands and southeastern Bahamas on Sunday.

As it traveled over open waters, Hanna sustained winds of 45 mph.