AGUADA, Cuba · Luis Angel Diaz surveyed his flooded, flattened crops and roofless house, wondering how he would make it through the rest of what is expected to be a bruising, busy hurricane season.

"If no other hurricane comes we will recover, otherwise everything will be lost," said Diaz, 32, a farmer who lives off Cuba's central highway in an isolated homestead surrounded by citrus fields and other crops. "No one knows what other storms will come. But I have four kids. I have to pick up and try to get ahead."

From Cuba's southeastern tip to its central provinces, Cubans began cleaning up after Hurricane Dennis slammed the island, killing at least 10 and leaving thousands homeless. On Sunday, linemen began fixing power lines in central Cuba and electricity was restored to a few neighborhoods in Havana and the surrounding province. Cleanup crews cleared fallen trees and supply trucks with construction materials arrived in Camagüey province, in Cuba's agricultural heartland, where Dennis damaged or destroyed more than 2,191 homes. Officers from Cuba's armed forces used two amphibious vehicles to rescue 70 people from the rooftops of flooded homes in Havana province, Cuban television reported.

Low-lying areas in nearby Matanzas province were also flooded by Dennis' driving rains. But local officials estimated losses were not as great as those from Hurricane Michelle in 2001, which damaged or destroyed at least 450,000 homes in Cuba, as well as 780 government buildings.

In the eastern province of Granma, which had never before been struck by a Category 4 hurricane, 193 people remained in shelters. There, Dennis damaged or destroyed 15,000 homes, according to preliminary estimates from government officials. In Santiago province 2,000 homes were damaged, officials said.

Havana, home to 2.2 million Cubans, emerged from the storm largely unscathed. On Sunday, tourists wandered the streets of Old Havana, children played stickball in the streets and shops and restaurants were open.

But in central Cuba, where Dennis made landfall on Friday afternoon, recovery efforts were just beginning to get under way.

In Aguada, a small city off Cuba's central highway, 6,000 homes were damaged and another 400 were demolished, Orlando Diaz, a local Communist Party official, said Sunday.

Diaz said 666 people in the city remained in shelters and another 5,722 were living in the homes of relatives and friends. One fourth of the city's 46 schools were damaged as well as a sugar mill, Diaz said.

The storm was particularly painful for those who lost everything four years ago, during Hurricane Michelle.

"I thought I had a safe house after the last one was demolished. Now we find ourselves in the same conditions," said Aguada resident Adelfa Cabrera, 37, whose roof was ripped from her home. "Whenever we see there's a hurricane coming our way, we get so nervous our hearts go to our throats."

In Aguada's Jose Marti elementary school, 282 people slept on mattresses on classroom floors and hung their clothes from the windows to dry.

"My house has been on the verge of collapse for some time," said Estrella Castillo, 51, a maintenance worker at the local Communist Party office. "Now its uninhabitable; the tiles blew away, the wooden boards were stripped away. I've been in this shelter for three days. I'm waiting for the government to help me."

Many Cubans were completely dependent on government aid to help them recover. Some building materials such as roofing supplies are not sold commercially. Instead, they are distributed by a government commission that decides which residents are the most needy.

Some Cubans are given paid time off from their work to rebuild their homes with government subsidized supplies. But Cuba is facing a severe housing shortage and many say there are never enough building materials, even in the best of times.

"We've been trying to finish a house since 1998, but there aren't any materials. There's nothing to be bought it's too expensive," said farmer Florentino Gomez, whose home and crops, including 4,500 papaya plants, were damaged. "Now, we'll have to wait for help."

Vanessa Bauzá can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com

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