HAVANA: Hurricane Sandy plowed across Cuba early on Thursday as a “strong” category two storm after battering Jamaica, where it downed power lines and forced hundreds of people to seek emergency shelter.

The US-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that the storm was packing winds of up to 175 kilometers per hour as it made landfall at about 1:25 am (local time) but weakened slightly as it moved north across the island.

The hurricane is expected to gradually weaken further as it moves off Cuba’s northeast coast, but will remain a hurricane as it passes over the Bahamas on Thursday, the NHC said.

Before strengthening to a category two storm on the five-rung Saffir-Simpson wind scale, the hurricane had plowed across Jamaica on Wednesday, reportedly killing one person and lashing the shantytowns around the capital Kingston.

Jamaican paper The Gleaner said that the storm’s first known casualty was a 74-year-old man who was killed when a boulder rolled onto a house. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or loss of life in Cuba.

Jamaica’s electricity provider said that some 70 percent of its customers were without power due to the high winds and torrential rain, and police had ordered a 48-hour curfew in an effort to deter looters.

The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management said that more than 1,064 people had moved into emergency shelters across the country, according to The Gleaner.

The eye of Sandy made landfall eight kilometers south of Kingston on Wednesday afternoon, packing winds of 80 miles per hour.

The storm was forecast to dump up to 30 centimeters of rain across Jamaica, eastern Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with some areas seeing isolated totals of 20 inches.

“These rains may produce life-threatening flash floods and mud-slides, especially in areas of mountainous terrain,” the NHC warned.

On the forecast track, Sandy will head to the Bahamas on Friday. Tropical storm conditions were also forecast for Florida’s east coast.

As heavy rain doused Cuba on Wednesday, some 1,700 people were evacuated in the country’s Santiago de Cuba province as a precautionary measure.

“We cannot put a single human life in danger. We must evacuate people in areas we know are likely to be flooded, without losing time,” local civil defense official Lazaro Esposito told Cuban television.

The hurricane also brought rough weather to the US naval base at Guantanamo where terror suspects are held.

The Pentagon said that a preliminary hearing at Guantanamo involving the alleged al-Qaeda mastermind of the USS Cole bombing in 2000 was delayed until Thursday due to the storm.

In 2008, Cuba was hit by three hurricanes that caused a total of $10 billion in damage and affected more than half a million homes.

Tropical Storm Gustav, which was less powerful than Hurricane Sandy, with sustained winds of 70 miles per hour, killed seven people in Jamaica in 2008.

Hurricane Ivan, a maximum category five on the Saffir-Simpson scale and the sixth most intense Atlantic hurricane on record, killed 17 people and left 18,000 homeless when it smashed into Jamaica in September 2004.