MIAMI — A weakened Hurricane Ike toppled dozens of dilapidated buildings in Havana on Tuesday as the storm that killed scores in a weeklong blast through the Caribbean moved into the Gulf of Mexico on a course for Texas.
Forecasters with the National Hurricane Center here projected that the storm, which weakened to a Category 1 hurricane with 75-mph winds as it exited Cuba during the afternoon, would track westward to strike near the Texas-Mexico border by the weekend, bypassing most of the U.S. oil industry's drilling operations in the gulf.
But Ike was expected to intensify as it crossed the warm gulf waters in the coming days, amassing winds of at least 111 mph to gain Category 3 force by Thursday.
"Now that Ike has emerged into the Gulf of Mexico, strengthening is expected and Ike could become a major hurricane in the central gulf," the hurricane center stated.
The Cuban capital had braced for the worst, with authorities evacuating thousands of residents from the city's most decrepit buildings, bringing to 1.23 million the number of Cubans displaced by the storm. An enclave of treasured but decaying Spanish colonial and Art Deco architecture, Havana loses dozens, sometimes hundreds, of buildings every year to collapse from poor maintenance and severe weather.
State television showed images of a storm surge crashing over the hip-high Malecon seaside parapet and sweeping across the empty road that separates the waterfront from some of the most vulnerable buildings in the capital.
Ike dumped at least a foot of rain on devastated Pinar del Rio province as it made its way out of Cuba. That westernmost area of tobacco, coffee and sugar cane crops suffered widespread damage 10 days earlier when Hurricane Gustav tore through the fields with winds of 150 mph. The earlier storm toppled 140,000 buildings, most of them small wooden bungalows housing farming families, and at least 10,000 more fell as Ike made its three-day blast across the island.
Cuba's National Defense Council for Disaster Cases identified four people killed by the latest hurricane, two electrocuted in Villa Clara province as they tried to dismantle a television antenna and two killed when their homes collapsed on them in Camaguey and Holguin provinces. Fatalities are rare in Cuba despite the frequency of hurricanes, a fact ascribed to the government's mass evacuation practices whenever storms threaten populated areas.
