Gustav lashes Cuba on way to monster storm in Gulf

By Jeff Franks

HAVANA (Reuters) - Hurricane Gustav blasted across Cuba's Isle of Youth and toward the mainland with 150-mph (240-kph) winds and lashing rains on Saturday as forecasters said it could grow into a catastrophic Category 5 storm on its way to the oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico.

A day after the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's deadly strike on New Orleans, Gustav was a Category 4 storm as it crossed the Isle of Youth, which has 86,000 residents, just off southwest Cuba.

Gustav could rival the threat posed by Katrina in 2005 and emergency preparations extended to the U.S. Gulf Coast, where highways around New Orleans were jammed on Saturday and hundreds lined up to board buses.

Energy companies shut down three-quarters of oil production in the Gulf and prepared for the strongest storm in three years to hit an area that produces a quarter of U.S. crude and 15 percent of its natural gas.

Crude oil prices have risen in recent days and could soar if Tropical Storm Hanna, now in the Atlantic, follows Gustav in the offshore production areas.

Forecasters said Gustav was likely to near the central Louisiana coast as a Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity by late Monday or early Tuesday. Katrina was a Category 3 when it burst the levees protecting New Orleans on August 29, 2005.

Heavy rains and strong winds began to lash Cuba's western province of Pinar del Rio, the main tobacco-growing region, where Gustav was expected to hit the mainland.

In its latest advisory, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said the storm was centered 80 miles southwest of Havana and moving northwest at 15 mph (24 kph).

Power was out across most of Havana as the wind picked up and blew sheets of rain down the Cuban capital's seaside boulevards.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths, but a Cuban television report from the Isle of Youth said buildings had collapsed and two boats had been tossed into the city of Nueva Gerona.

"The wind here is terrible. This is looking very bad," said a woman named Consuelo, a Nueva Gerona resident who preferred not to give her full name.

"I can't leave from nor open the doors or anything because the wind will take everything away," she said.

"Right now, we have a lot of rain, many fallen trees and the banana crop is almost completely on the ground," said Noel Diaz Gonzalez in the Pinar del Rio town of Paso Quemado.

"We continue evacuating people to stronger buildings but so far there are no building collapses or serious damage."

Workers rushed to move recently harvested tobacco crops to safe places and Cuban officials said at least 200,000 people had been evacuated from areas in the path of the storm.