BY ELAINE DE VALLE

Since Hurricane Charley destroyed her Havana home nearly two weeks ago, Miguelina Ane and her two children -- 10-year-old Ruth and 16-month-old Enrique -- have slept on the floor of the front porch of another house.

''My eldest daughter, who lives with her in-laws, she gives us what little she can to eat every day so that the children are not hungry,'' Ane, the wife of a jailed dissident, told The Herald in a telephone interview.

Her home was one of the more than 70,000 that the Cuban Communist Party's Granma newspaper on Wednesday reported were destroyed or damaged when Charley slammed into the western half of the island Aug. 13, killing four. The Granma report also estimated the damage at more than $1 billion.

That's about half of the $1.9 billion in damages caused in Cuba by Hurricane Michelle in 2001, and more than the $713 million reported in total damages from hurricanes Isidore and Lily in 2002, said Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a leading expert on Cuba's economy. Those three storms destroyed 36,000 dwellings and damaged another 272,000, he added.

''So this is an important blow to the economy, but it's not something that cannot be coped with,'' said Mesa-Lago, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Cuban government has repaired most of the infrastructure damage from the previous storms, he said, though housing construction has lagged.

MANY COMPLAINTS

But long after Charley's eye passed over Havana, residents are still complaining about lengthy power outages, downed telephone lines and water shortages because municipal pumps lack electricity.

''I understand, however, that there is very serious shortages of electricity and water in Havana and that there has been significant damage inflicted to major harvests like tobacco,'' Mesa-Lago said.

Granma quoted Pedro Sáez Montejo, first secretary of the Communist Party for Havana, as saying that Charley ruined thousands of acres of crops.

Sáez also said that thousands of state workers were deployed to deliver water, repair power and telephone lines and collect fallen trees and other debris.

José Antonio Fernández, president of the Cuban telephone company, was quoted as saying that while alternate routes would be found to restore some services by the end of the month, some of the cables would not be repaired until October.

According to the paper, about half of those living in Havana province, a mostly rural area around the capital, remained without electricity Tuesday.

The entire province of Pinar del Rio, farther to the west -- where people are reportedly still at shelters after the storms in 2002 -- were also without power for a record 11 days as of Tuesday.

Although the Cuban government evacuated more than 200,000 people from flood-prone areas before the storm, Ane said the area where she lived was not among them. Only when Charley began tearing apart the home did she leave.

''We had to leave there running when the rains got very hard. We had to abandon the house with what little clothes we could carry in our hands at that moment,'' Ane said. "Right now we are homeless. We are on the street.''

She said her husband, Enrique Mustelier, was jailed last month on charges of trying to leave the country illegally and had served prison time in the 1990s for organizing antigovernment demonstrations.

TURNED AWAY

That's why, she asserted, while the government provides shelter and a few other services to those who lost their homes, she was turned away.

''They told me I have no right to any assistance because of my form of thinking and my husband's form of thinking,'' Ane said. ``The government told me that we can't count on them, that I am on my own.''

Moises Leonardo Rodríguez Valdés said Ane's is not the only case where authorities have denied emergency aid to members of the opposition. ''In Cuba, everything is politicized -- even a hurricane,'' Rodríguez said.

''Of course, they have proclaimed loudly and proudly about the recovery effort and how everything is going back to normal. But in Cuba, normality is abnormal,'' he said.

''In zones where the [electric] service has been restored, the people still have service that is intermittent. Yesterday there was an eight-hour blackout in parts of Havana. You walk around and you can still see piles of rubble everywhere,'' he said.

Pilar, a Havana woman in her 50s who asked that her surname not be published, said power is mostly normal on her street now after a week without any electricity. Gas and water were also out for a week, but have since returned to her Playa neighborhood.

What hasn't been quick, she said, was the cleanup effort.

''We're still picking up tree trunks and glass and garbage everywhere,'' she said.

One of the homes that were damaged belongs to the family of Sylvia Wilhelm, a Cuban-American activist in Miami.

''At my cousin's house, part of the roof and a door blew away,'' Wilhelm said. ``There was substantial damage in the areas of Santa Fe. And trees have fallen everywhere.''

She is helping to collect goods to send to hurricane victims on the island. And Wednesday, Miami Archbishop John C. Favalora asked South Florida Catholics to contribute to a special collection at all parishes this weekend that will assist relief efforts in Florida and Cuba.

But earlier this week, Cuba rejected a U.S. government offer of $50,000 in post-hurricane aid to nongovernmental organizations as ``cynical and hypocritical.''

A U.S. State Department official Wednesday said the government does not have an independent assessment of damages in Cuba because it has not sent a team to review damages on the ground.