Gustav Devastates Cuba, but Spares Lives

HAVANA, Aug. 31, 2008— -- Hurricane Gustav plowed into the Cuban province of Pinar del Rio Saturday, leaving devastation and despair, but no death, in its wake.

"It was really terrible, and I was 50 miles from the eye. I thought that the horror, the noise, would never end," said William Diaz, a resident of the city of Pinar del Rio.

Images and reports trickled in today from Cuba's westernmost province and from the Isle of Youth, just off its southern coast, where the Category 4 storm, boasting 150 mph winds and gusts much stronger, leveled everything in its path.

Dozens of high-tension towers were either mangled or completely knocked down and hundreds of trees and utility poles were uprooted and toppled. Modest homes were ripped from their foundations, schools left in shambles, health clinics trashed and concrete apartment buildings blown apart. Throughout the hardest-hit areas there was one roofless home after another.

Tornadoes reportedly mixed in the eye and area residents wandered and pondered and cried today, still stunned by the hurricane's force as local officials began recovery efforts.

The Cuban weather service said one of its stations measured a wind gust of 204 mph, the highest ever recorded.

Miraculously, no deaths had been reported in Cuba as of this afternoon, after Gustav killed at least 86 people in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.

The island nation's well respected civil defense system was credited with avoiding loss of life, evacuating some 250,000 people, among them hundreds of foreign tourists, from out of the path of the storm's eye.

There was little information from the Isle of Youth, 40 miles off the southwestern coast, which took a direct hit from Gustav before it made landfall. Officials were still picking through the wreckage.

State television showed piles of rubble, concrete walls with gaping holes, flooded factories and large boats lifted from their moorings and left in the middle of the island's capital city Nueva Gerona.

The storm scattered trees and telephone poles like pick-up sticks and the 800,000 residents of Pinar del Rio and the Isle of Youth remained without power on Sunday, as did most of the more than 3 million residents of adjoining Havana province and the capital. People used wood to cook.