Paloma downgraded to tropical storm over Cuba
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Hurricane Paloma weakened as it stalled over south-eastern Cuba after battering the island with lashing rain and gale-force winds.
After making landfall on Cuba's south-east coast earlier in the day as a powerful Category Three hurricane, Paloma quickly declined to a tropical storm and now has winds of 95 kilometers an hour, the United States National Hurricane Centre.
Authorities did not report any victims, but had begun to assess the storm's damage to sanitation and the power grid.
Faced with a devastating storm, more than 500,000 Cubans were evacuated to central provinces.
Some 3,000 foreign tourists were taking shelter on northern holiday islands in the region of Ciego de Avila, the Civil Defence said.
The town of Santa Cruz found itself in Paloma's crosshairs 76 years after another major hurricane devastated the area, killing more than 3,000 people in what was the largest natural disaster in modern Cuban history.
But even weakened, the storm was expected to wreak havoc on the cash-strapped communist-ruled island of more than 11 million people, which has been already devastated this season by two other monster storms.
Authorities said the country was up to the challenge.
"We'll have to continue rebuilding, continue to move forward," General Jose Ramon Pardo Guerra, chief of staff of the Civil Defence, told local radio.
Moving north-east at four kilometers an hour, Paloma was "forecast to degenerate to a weak area of low pressure by Monday," the NHC said.
- AFP
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