Havana/Port-au-Prince/Mexico City  - Hurricane Ike was by Monday a serious threat to the whole of Cuba.

As early as Sunday afternoon, the surging sea in north-eastern Cuba had built waves several metres tall and forced its way deep into the coastal towns in the province of Holguin.

By 10 pm local time, when the eye of the storm made landfall near Punta Lucrecia, some 800,000 people had already been taken to safety. Power was down, and people throughout the region waited in complete darkness for Ike to pass.

Communist Cuba's elderly revolutionary leader Fidel Castro published an article Monday under the headline "Besieged by hurricanes."

"The entire nation is now in what in military terms is defined as combat alert," Castro said.

As he did just over a week earlier, when Hurricane Gustav devastated western Cuba, the ailing leader who in February turned the Cuban presidency over to his brother made the most of the natural disaster to rebut expectations by his countrymen for better and easier living.

"We should be more rational than ever and fight wastage, parasitism and complacency. We have to act with absolute honesty, avoiding demagoguery or any concession whatsoever to weakness or opportunism," Castro warned.

The text was read out on television late Sunday and published in the state's print media on Monday.

Like Haiti, Cuba has been particularly affected by tropical storms this year. Gustav devastated the western end of the island, leaving scores of thousands of homes unfit to live in, destroying tobacco fields, banana plantations, bean and rice crops, and breaking down the power network.

Gustav alone severely hampered the food supply for the population. And now Ike is busy going through the entire Caribbean island from east to west.

The destructive force of the rain had earlier caused devastation the Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic and especially Haiti.

Since mid-August, three tropical storms have hit the region, and caused particularly-deadly rain in Haiti.

In Haiti, more than 300 people have been killed by storms during the current storm season. Ike caused at least 70 deaths, while Tropical Storm Hanna left some 170 dead. Earlier Hurricane Gustav killed more than 70 people, and before that Tropical Storm Fay left at least 40 dead. Scores more remained missing.

Like Cuba, the whole of Haiti has been affected by the storms. Gustav hit the south particularly hard, while Hanna mostly affected the north, to devastate basically all of the country's agricultural production.

Aid organizations have already warned of the hunger crisis in Haiti, already the poorest country in the Americas.

The still-flooded region around Gonaïves remained out of reach for aid transport because key bridges had collapsed.

"This will become a big problem," the head of Welthungerhilfe in Haiti, Michael Kuehn, said Monday.

Thousands of people have already fled the hardest-hit regions for fear of hunger. (dpa)