Hurricane Michelle Roars Across Cuba
Evacuations Ordered in Florida Keys

By ANITA SNOW
.c The Associated Press

HAVANA (Nov. 4) - Hurricane Michelle roared across a pitch-black Cuba Sunday night as the government shut down power and evacuated 750,000 people from a storm packing gusts of up to 130 mph. The island was also without phone service because of Michelle, which Fidel Castro likened to a U.S.-funded invasion in 1961.

Forecasters said the storm had probably peaked by late Sunday, and was hovering over the northern part of the island. The Florida Keys were evacuated as meteorologists warned that the island chain likely would be brushed by the storm, which was expected around the Bahamas on Monday morning.

With communications nearly completely knocked out, conditions on Cuba were unclear. There were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries, and the only confirmed damage was to a state television transmitting facility on the Isle of Youth, off the main island's southern coast.

Castro called an impromptu news conference in Havana late Sunday, saying 750,000 people had been evacuated and noting that Michelle had entered Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, on the southern Zapata Peninsula. He compared the hurricane to the invasion by a CIA-funded army of exiles that landed there in a botched attempt to overthrow him 40 years ago.

''Our people are well organized, they have experience. The greatest success will be to keep the number of victims low,'' he said.

The government shut off power across the island shortly after the storm made landfall around 4 p.m., some 70 miles southeast of Havana, apparently as a precaution. With telephones down, emergency workers were forced to rely on ham radios.

''The (Cuban) civil defense is trying to set up ham radio stations throughout the island to transmit information,'' said Julio Ripoll, a spokesman for the U.S. National Hurricane Center's volunteer amateur radio station in Miami. ''I think they will have a communications blackout, except for ham radio, for quite a while.''

The hurricane center was using ham radio to keep in touch with more than 140 radio operators on Cuba, Ripoll said.

The storm battered central-western Cuba during the day with sustained winds of 125 mph and gusts of up to 130 mph, the Hurricane Center said. Over the last four days, 10 to 20 inches of rain had fallen on the island, hurricane forecaster Hugh Cobb said.

In Havana, there was no rain as of late Sunday night but the winds were howling and residents were indoors, in the darkness.

Michelle also created an 18-foot storm surge on the outlying island of Cayo Largo on Cuba's south coast Sunday, but there was no immediate word on what damage it caused.


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