Cuba ordered the evacuation of 200,000 people as Hurricane Ivan threatened its world-famous tobacco crop.

BY NANCY SAN MARTIN

Cuba deployed buses, trucks and trains to evacuate some 200,000 people Saturday from coastal and flood-prone areas as Hurricane Ivan threatened to wallop its famed tobacco crop and deal yet another blow to its struggling economy.

All commercial transportation between Havana and the east was suspended and the government was shutting down its sugar processing plants, harvesting ripe bananas, moving animals, storing seeds and chemical products, clearing drainage canals and trimming trees that could be toppled by Ivan's winds.

Men and boys climbed walls and crawled atop roofs to pull down television antennas and tie down the lids of water tanks to prevent them from becoming giant Frisbees during the storm.

All airports were ordered closed by midnight Saturday, and foreign workers, tourists and diplomats were taking shelter in some of Havana's more modern hotels.

With winds of 165 mph, the Category 5 storm was projected to brush past the citrus-growing Isle of Youth off the southern coast Monday morning and then cut across the westernmost province, Pinar del Río, the heart of Cuba's world-famous tobacco industry.

Tobacco and citrus account for a combined $280 million in annual exports, said John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a New York group that monitors trade with the communist-ruled island.

HAVANA ALERT

But Havana residents remained alert as well. The government said it was watching Ivan closely to see whether it would order the evacuation of some 130,000 residents there, on top of the 200,000 already ordered to evacuate coastal and low-lying areas.

Some Cubans have vowed to stay in their homes, saying they feared thieves would break in while they were away. But Civil Defense officials warned repeatedly that the evacuation orders were ``mandatory.''

''We'd like to remind everyone that life is more important than anything else,'' the head of the Civil Defense, General Ramón Pardo Guerra told Radio Rebelde. ``We can always recuperate the material things.''

Pedro, a 67-year-old retired accountant who did not want to give his last name, told The Herald that he was confident he could survive in his 80-year-old building in Havana.

''This should hold,'' he said with a smile, while he pushed on a flimsy wooden door that leads into his garage. ``After all, you only live once, right?''

Other Havana residents complained that they could not find any construction materials to protect their homes from Ivan. Cuba has been wallowing in an economic crisis, where virtually all goods are in short supply, since the end of its Soviet subsidies in 1991.

NO SUPPLIES

''We don't have any wood,'' said a Havana woman, adding that some of her neighbors took doors off the hinges between rooms in their homes and nailed them over the windows.

As the woman spoke on the phone to a Herald reporter in Miami, a member of her Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, a civilian neighborhood watch group, knocked on her door to determine whether they had a safe place to go.

''I see you have a television and a video [cassette player]; make sure you safeguard your belongings before you leave,'' the CDR official said.

''The television is going to go to the bathroom,'' the woman told The Herald. ``And I'm going to put a blanket over it. It's the best I can do.''

But the country's crumbling infrastructure could well fail what may be its ultimate test.

Many of Cuba's highways are already in disrepair. Hundreds of thousands of people live in wooden houses, while others have makeshift cardboard walls and tin and fiberglass roofs. Many Havana buildings and churches are propped up with wooden support beams, and others that lack roofs are covered only with tarps.

`STRONGEST STORM'

Weather Service Director José Rubiera warned that Ivan, which has already left about 50 dead in the Caribbean, was ''the strongest storm system to affect us in the entire revolutionary era'' -- since President Fidel Castro seized power in 1959.

And it comes just a month after Hurricane Charley slashed across the island, leaving five dead, knocking out power and water supplies for weeks and causing an estimated $1 billion in damages in the island of 11 million people. The last time two powerful hurricanes hit Cuba back to back was in 1948.

Herald staff writers Elaine De Valle and Renato Perez contributed to this report.