Killer hurricane blacks out Cuba
Hurricane Michelle roared across Cuba today as the government shut down power and evacuated 750,000 people from the path of a storm which generated gusts of up to 130 mph.
The island was also without telephones because of the hurricane which has already killed 12 people in Central America and Jamaica.
Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro likened Michelle to the United States-funded invasion of the country in 1961.
Forecasters said the storm probably peaked by early Monday and was hovering over the northern part of the island.
Further north, the Florida Keys were evacuated as meteorologists warned that the United States island chain was likely to be brushed by the storm, which was expected around the Bahamas today.
With communications nearly completely knocked out, conditions on Cuba were unclear.
There were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries, and the only confirmed damage was to a state television transmitting facility on the Isle of Youth, off the main island’s southern coast.
Castro called an impromptu news conference in Havana late on Sunday, saying 750,000 people had been evacuated from the path of Michelle across the island of 11 million people.
He also noted that Michelle entered Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, on the southern Zapata Peninsula and compared it to the invasion by a CIA-funded army of exiles that landed there in a botched attempt to overthrow him 40 years ago.
‘‘Our people are well organised, they have experience. The greatest success will be to keep the number of victims low,’’ he said.
The government shut off power across the western half of the island shortly after the storm made landfall around 4pm, 70 miles southeast of Havana, apparently as a precaution.
With telephones down, emergency workers were forced to rely on about 140 radio hams scattered across the country.
‘‘The (Cuban) civil defence is trying to set up ham radio stations throughout the island to transmit information,’’ said Julio Ripoll, a spokesman for the US National Hurricane Centre’s volunteer amateur radio station in Miami.
‘‘I think they will have a communications blackout, except for ham radio, for quite a while.’’
The storm battered central-western Cuba during the day with sustained winds of 125mph and gusts of up to 130mph, the Hurricane Centre said.
Over the last four days, 10 to 20 inches of rain have fallen on the island.
In Havana, there was no rain as of late on Sunday but the winds were howling and residents were indoors in the darkness.
Michelle also created an 18-foot storm surge on the outlying island of Cayo Largo on Cuba’s south coast Sunday, but there was no immediate word on what damage it caused.
The storm was projected to veer east toward the Bahamas with winds near 100mph and cross near Andros Islands late Monday morning.
It could come within 60 miles of the Bahamian capital, Nassau, home to most of the country’s 300,000 people, forecasters said.
