Tropical storm nears Cuba after leaving four dead

Forecasters said Fay was expected to strengthen on Sunday and could be hurricane strength when it passes over Cuba and zeros in on Florida, where officials declared a state of emergency on Saturday.

In Cuba, officials in the eastern province of Santiago advised farmers to move livestock to higher ground and were preparing to evacuate tourists from low-lying coastal areas, the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported on its Web site.

Cuba’s government said a hurricane watch was in effect for the island from the province of Matanzas east to Sancti Spiritus, and a tropical storm warning was in effect for Guantanamo Bay. Fay’s path was expected to take it near the southern coast of the island on Sunday and over western Cuba on Sunday night or Monday.

The US National Hurricane Center in Miami said late Saturday night that the storm was located about 175 miles (280 kilometers) southeast of Camaguey, Cuba. It was heading west at about 14 mph (22 kph), with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (75 kph).

A man died Saturday in Haiti while trying to cross a river in Leogane, south of Port-au-Prince, said Marie Alta Jean-Baptiste, head of Haiti’s civil protection department. No further information was immediately available.

Rice fields in the Artibonite Valley, Haiti’s most fertile region, were flooded, according to reports from Radio Ginen. And Fay’s heavy winds destroyed banana crops in Arcahaie, north of the capital, although it is unclear how many acres were affected, Jean-Baptiste said.

Haiti has struggled to cope with a food crisis that sparked deadly riots in April.

In neighboring Dominican Republic, a 34-year-old woman drowned when her family tried to cross a swollen river in a car, civil defense agency director Luis Luna Paulino said. The bodies of her missing 13-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew were found Saturday afternoon, but her husband swam to safety.

A tropical storm warning has been issued for the Cayman Islands, and a tropical storm watch remains in effect for the Bahamas and Jamaica.

In Florida, Gov. Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency. Fay “threatens the state of Florida with a major disaster,” he wrote in an executive order.

Residents and tourists in the Florida Keys prepared for the storm, which forecasters said could strengthen to a hurricane and begin battering the island chain as soon as Monday.

Forecasters predicted that the sixth named storm of the 2008 season would make landfall in the US somewhere along western coast of Florida on Tuesday as a hurricane, said Corey Walton, a hurricane support meteorologist at the hurricane center.