Havana - Hurricane Ike made landfall in Cuba, packing maximum sustained winds of 195 kilometres per hour, after sweeping destruction across Haiti, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.

The eye of the storm hit about 10 pm Sunday (0200 GMT Monday) near Punta Lucrecia in Hulguin province, the Cuban weather service said.

Ike weakened into a category 3 storm on the five-category Saffir-Simpson scale before it churned up metres-high waves and torrential rains in Cuba, where hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated. Cuba also began evacuating an estimated 13,000 international tourists from the Varadero peninsula, 120 kilometres east of Havana.

The storm was expected to lose more steam as it crosses the 1,000-kilometre-long Caribbean island from east to west before returning to open water Tuesday south of the US state of Florida.

In Haiti, at least 47 people died in the storm, drowning in the city of Cabaret, the Haiti Press news agency reported. Ike's torrential rains caused the Bretelle River to breach its banks and flood the entire city 35 kilometres north of Port-au-Prince.

Ike was the latest storm to hit the poverty-stricken country since mid-August. It brought the number of dead there from Hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike to at least 323 people.

In the Turks and Caicos, 80 per cent of the homes were reported damaged or destroyed by Ike, but the 38,000 residents of the string of 30 islands were brought to safety.

Rescue officials were bracing for higher death tolls as the rain continued across the Caribbean.

Forecasters predicted Ike's next port of call would be Florida, where evacuations had already started, first of tourists, then of residents in the Florida Keys, which stretch out toward western Cuba.

US President George W Bush declared Florida a disaster area in advance to free up emergency aid money and deployment of the National Guard when the storm hits.

Uneasy about ongoing tropical storms, the US space agency said it would delay two shuttle missions by two days. The Atlantis shuttle to repair the Hubble telescope is now slated for October 10, and the Endeavour mission to the International Space Station is slated for November 10.

Cuba was still recovering from Hurricane Gustav eight days ago, which left 100,000 people homeless and prompted the Cuban government to ask the US government to suspend its decades-old embargo on exports of desperately needed material for recovery and protection of human life.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a resounding "no" to the request. Speaking to reporters in Rabat, Morocco, Rice said it would not be "wise" to lift the embargo now, given the authoritarian passing of power from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul earlier this year, which she said is "not acceptable in a Western Hemisphere that is democratic and it is not acceptable for the Cuban people."

The Cuban daily newspaper Juventud Rebelde warned Sunday that Ike could be the biggest threat to the communist island in 50 years.

In Cuba, high alarm was sounded for Santiago de Cuba, Granma, Holguin, Las Tunas, Camaguey, Ciego de Avila, Villa Clara, Sancti Spiritus and Cienfuegos y Matanzas.

In Haiti, hundreds of thousands in the northern town of Gonaives have been virtually cut off from relief supplies after the previous storms destroyed bridges.

But Manuela Gonzalez, head of the UN offices for humanitarian aid in Haiti, dismissed media reports that 500 had died. (dpa)