The communist Caribbean nation lifted a state of alert but much of the country remained paralyzed, lacking transport, electricity or drinking water.

Winds and rain lashed northwestern areas, including the capital Havana, which kept tropical storm warnings.

"These rains are likely to cause life-threatening flash floods and mud slides over mountainous terrain," the US National Hurricane Center warned in its latest bulletin.

Ike left more than 100 people dead across the Caribbean on the back of several devastating storms in recent weeks.

A Cuban man died Wednesday when part of an old Havana building collapsed, bringing the toll there to five.

The man, in his fifties, had been evacuated from his Havana apartment but when he returned to check out the damage, part of the building collapsed on him.

More than 20,000 people had been evacuated from colonial-era Old Havana, an elegant but fragile UNESCO World Heritage Site of centuries-old buildings that are prone to cave-ins.

First reports showed that Ike caused six buildings to collapse completely and 46 partially in Havana and damaged thousands more across the country.

Ike killed only five people in Cuba after 2.6 million residents were evacuated from vunlerable areas. But the storm damaged vast areas of cropland and caused widespread power outages.

Calling on Cubans to "rise up" and work on recovery efforts, Vice President Jose Ramon Machado said hurricanes Ike and Gustav, which struck the previous week, were "a hard blow for the Cuban economy."

Ike sparked new flooding in Cuba's western Pinar del Rio province, two weeks after Gustav slammed into the same area.

Rescue services in a country proud of its record for dealing with disasters mobilized across the island Wednesday, helping victims, removing rubble and attempting to restore communication and energy networks.

"Right now I'm thinking about where to find water to cook," 35-year-old Laritsa Hernandez, told AFP in an old house in central Havana. "We're three adults and three children. Imagine! The situation is very difficult."

Electricity poles, traffic lights and trees ripped up or knocked down by strong winds littered Havana, where only police patrolled the streets.

Authorities called on those of Havana's 2.2 million inhabitants who did not evacuate the city to stay indoors.

Losses were estimated at billions of dollars, adding to damage left by Gustav only 10 days ago.

Although Ike was much weaker than Gustav -- category one compared with category four on the five-notch Saffir-Simpson scale -- it compounded Pinar del Rio's devastation, where some 100,000 homes were already destroyed and 600 schools damaged.

"We had to stop repair work to prepare for Ike," Benito Carrasco, head of civil defense in La Palma, Pinar del Rio, told AFP.

"This damage will take us backwards by several years," said 62-year-old plumber Rolando.

Rescue operations in eastern Cuba, where Ike hit first, slowly revealed the extent of the damage.

Strong winds and intense rains temporarily stopped nickel production operations -- Cuba's main export -- in the eastern Holguin province.

"In Holguin province alone, 87,424 homes are affected, including more than 37,000 totally destroyed, and more than 3,586 hectares (8,965 acres) of agricultural plantations are affected," said Miguel Diaz-Canal, first secretary of the Communist Party in Holguin.

Chaparra, a town of 51,000 inhabitants in the eastern Las Tunas, was almost wiped off the map, residents said.

International offers to help poured into Cuba and across the Caribbean, especially to the desperately poor nation of Haiti where hundreds have died after a battering from four storms.

The US State Department on Tuesday renewed an offer to send experts to Cuba to assess its aid needs, but said that its decades-old foe had declined an earlier bid to send a team there after Hurricane Gustav.

Ike strengthened to a powerful category two storm Wednesday as it moved over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, home to the bulk of US oil refineries.

It was expected to strengthen further before striking the southern Texas coastline early Saturday, according to the NHC.

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