Hurricane Ike Weakens to Category 2 Storm As It Moves Over Cuba

Hurricane Ike weakened to a category 2 storm today as it moved across Cuba towards the capital Havana, with its winds and storm surge destroying houses and toppling trees.

At 5am local time Ike had maximum sustained winds near 105mph with the US National Hurricane Center predicting the storm would further weaken as it moves through central Cuba today.

More than 770,000 Cubans have been evacuated to shelters or higher ground in an attempt to escape the hurricane's full fury. Ike had earlier raked the Bahamas and worsened floods in Haiti, which have already killed at least 319 people.

Weather forecasters said the hurricane could enter the Gulf of Mexico next, with Louisiana among the likely targets. The Hurricane Center today issued a tropical storm warning for the Florida Keys.

On Florida's Key West, tourists and residents were ordered to evacuate ahead of Ike's expected arrival tomorrow. The hurricane is forecast to make landfall later between the Florida Panhandle and the Texas coast, with New Orleans once again a possible target.

Many residents there are still returning after fleeing Gustav, a storm that in the US failed to deliver the punch it once threatened.

"Our citizens are weary and tired and have spent a lot of money evacuating from Gustav," said Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans. "My expectation this time is it will be very difficult to move the kind of numbers out of this city that we moved during Gustav."

Ike first slammed into the Turks and Caicos and the southernmost Bahamas islands as a category 4 hurricane, damaging 80% of homes with winds of up to 135mph. Thousands rode out the storm in shelters and there are no reports of casualties so far on the low-lying islands.

The Foreign Office last night advised against all but essential travel to Cuba.

Authorities at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the island's eastern tip, closed beaches and banned cars from roads. The cells holding terrorism suspects were hurricane-proof, said military officials.

Last week's storm wreaked billions of dollars of damage on Cuban agriculture and homes, leading Fidel Castro, the former president, to compare its impact to a nuclear bomb.

Ike also brought further devastation in Haiti, killing 48 people and destroying the last bridge into the port of Gonaives, where people are very short of food. The latest casualties brought Haiti's death toll from four tropical storms in less than a month to 306. Although rain stopped by late afternoon, large areas remained vulnerable to flooding because rivers were swollen from last week's tropical storm Hanna.