Hurricane Charley roared across Cuba early Friday leaving flooding and power blackouts before heading for Florida where hundreds of thousands of people have been told to move away from coastal districts.
Packing winds of about 110 miles per hour (175 miles) the hurricane battered the capital, Havana, for more than two hours before racing toward the United States where the National Hurricane Centre said it could become more powerful as it approaches the Florida coast.
Some 200,000 residents and 2,000 tourists were evacuated from risk areas in western Cuba. In Havana, authorities set up shelters with food and doctors, and shut off electricity as a precaution. No casualties were reported however.
Cuban President Fidel Castro, on his 78th birthday, visited the national meteorology institute as the hurricane hit the island just after midnight and stayed on national television for about 75 minutes to comment on the storm and other events.
Florida authorities have urged more than one million people along the western coast to head inland.
The National Hurricane Centre warned of storm surge flooding of up to 13 feet (3.9 meters) along the Florida coast, with potential flash floods and mudslides.
It said conditions were right for winds of (130 miles) (210 km) per hour to batter the state.
"It will come in like a bulldozer," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre in west Miami-Dade County. "It could be very life-threatening."
"This has the potential of being the one we've all been warning about," Florida Governor Jeb Bush said.
"It's going to cut a swath through the state that's going to impact millions of people."
The hurricane was expected to hit the Florida coast from midday Friday (1600 GMT), and the state government ordered thousands of people to leave the Keys.
The evacuation order by the state government extended up Florida's Gulf coast to Tampa Bay, as Charley was predicted to strike cities as far north as Tampa, and Jacksonville, Florida's northernmost east coast city of 800,000 people.
Authorities opened up schools and other public buildings to act as emergency shelter but many people ignored the evacuation order.
At the coastal town of Cedar Key, Police Chief Dan Swogger said in his little town at least, he did not expect a mass exodus. "The majority of people I've talked to have made it clear they're not going to be going."
Hurricane Charley missed Jamaica but came close to the Cayman Islands, the small British colony, forcing the closure of its main airport on Thursday.
Charley came on the heels of tropical storm Bonnie, which hit the Florida on Thursday with heavy rains.
Florida residents rushed to buy plywood to board up windows of homes, restaurants and stores.
At KLI True Value Supply, a hardware store in Key Largo, one worker described the scene in the store Thursday as "very, very busy" but said the mood was generally calm.
Oil companies were forced by the weather to cut production by about 420,000 barrels Wednesday, equal to one-quarter of the total production from the Gulf of Mexico, the Department of Interior said.
The hurricane also forced ChevronTexaco, BP, Shell and other companies to continue evacuating oil and gas platforms in the central and eastern gulf on Thursday.