Tropical Storm Paloma, downgraded from hurricane status, weakened rapidly Sunday after hitting Cuba with high winds and heavy rains and raking across the wealthy Cayman Islands.
The National Hurricane Service in Miami said Paloma's winds had dropped to tropical storm levels of 70 miles per hour , but the Cuban weather service said it was all but gone and was now not even a tropical depression.
Forecasters said winds high up in the atmosphere had basically blown the late-season storm away as it crossed Cuba on its way to the Atlantic Ocean.
At its peak on Saturday in the Caribbean Sea it was a menacing Category 4 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale with 145 mile per hour winds.
These dropped to 120 mph as it became the third storm to hit Cuba this year, but was still powerful enough to topple trees and power lines, damage homes and fell a communications tower on the southeastern coast.
Reports from Santa Cruz del Sur, where Paloma made landfall Saturday, said Paloma's storm surge had pushed seawater 1.5 km (one mile) inland, damaging homes in an area populated by 10,000 people.
Rainfall of up to 15 inches was reported in some areas.
Paloma was the eighth hurricane of a busy Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends Nov. 30. Its impact was magnified by the fact that it came on the heels of major storms Gustav and Ike in August and September from which Cuba was still recovering
Winds and a massive storm surge ripped apart houses and toppled trees as the storm roared towards Havana and its historic but decaying old buildings.
Ike is the latest in a series of huge storms to bring misery and destruction to the Caribbean. Ike has already killed dozens in Haiti, deepening the impoverished country's humanitarian disaster.
The head of Cuba's weather service, Jose Rubiera, said the outer wall of the eye of the hurricane made landfall at the eastern Cuban town of Punta Lucrecia.
With 195 km/h winds, Ike is the second powerful storm in eight days to strike Cuba, following hurricane Gustav.
"In all of Cuba's history, we have never had two hurricanes this close together," he said.
On Florida's Keys, tourists and residents were ordered to evacuate ahead of Ike's expected arrival and traffic filled the highway from the islands. Ike was forecast to make landfall later in the week between the Florida Panhandle and the Texas coast - with New Orleans once again in the crosshairs.
The hurricane slowed efforts to bring oil and gas production back online in the Gulf of Mexico following hurricane Gustav.
In Haiti, officials continued aid operations in the flood-stricken town of Gonaives.
Hundreds of bodies were found in Gonaives, in north-western Haiti, after a five-metre wall of water and mud engulfed much of the city of 350,000. At least 500 Haitians were killed last week by tropical storm Hanna.
Earlier, Ike ploughed across the low-lying Turks and Caicos as a category 4 storm, causing injuries and extensive damage on the British territory, before weakening slightly.
But the main concern was Haiti, where four storms in three weeks have killed at least 600 and left 650,000, including 300,000 children, in desperate need of food, clean water and shelter
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