Cuba was struggling on Tuesday to clean up after the island's worst hurricane in 50 years left five dead and thousands homeless.
The two million residents of Havana were still without water and electricity Tuesday. Besides shops, schools and banks remained closed.
Authorities were also struggling to remove some 2,500 trees knocked down by the storm.
Hurricane Michelle traversed Cuba from south to north with winds of more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) per hour in just six hours overnight Sunday to Monday, causing extensive damage to Cuba's electricity infrastructure.
Civil defense officials said 179 houses had collapsed in the city due to the storm and another 1,550 were damaged. The storm also knocked out 34 electrical transformers and damaged 67 schools.
Outside the city, the damage also was severe, adding another blow to Cuba's economy, which was already reeling from a tourism slump brought about by the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Near Playa Giron in southern Cuba, asphalt was ripped from roadways, according to images broadcast Tuesday.
Citrus, tobacco and banana crops were lost, and thousands more homes were destroyed in the provinces of Matanzas and Cienfuegos.
President Fidel Castro toured hard-hit areas Tuesday, saying that a "catastrophic" death toll was avoided by the government, which ordered thousands of people and livestock moved out of Michelle's path, including foreign tourists, a mainstay of the communist island's economy.
More than 150,000 of the 705,000 evacuees remained in shelters Tuesday.
Castro promised, "no one would remain unprotected or defenseless.
"We are going to get through this together," he said.
While in Matanzas, Castro paid a brief visit to the home of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who survived a shipwreck in the Florida Straits and became the subject of a prolonged custody battle between his relatives in Miami and his father in Cuba.
Meanwhile, Michelle, who killed 15 in Central America and the Caribbean, including five in Cuba, was expected to dissipate later Tuesday or early Wednesday over the Atlantic after passing through the Bahamas the day before, forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
Authorities on Bermuda lifted a tropical storm warning for the island as Michelle passed about (380 kilometers) 235 miles to the south.
(China Daily November 7,2001)
