HAVANA: On Sunday,  A rare tornado ripped through Havana late, leaving at least four dead and nearly two hundred injured as it tore off roofs, flipped vehicles and reduced some of the buildings in its path to rubble. The cyclone was the strongest to hit Cuba in nearly 80 years, according to Jose Rubiera, a meteorologist with the Cuban weather service. It pummeled its way 7.15 miles (11.5 km) through Havana over 16 minutes, at times reaching 0.62 miles (1 km) in diameter.

While The streets of the worse-hit neighborhoods, mainly in eastern and central Havana, were strewn on Monday with shards of glass and debris as well as downed trees and power lines. Some areas lacked electricity and running water.

Victoria Infanta Rodriguez, 47, surveying the wreckage of her home said that  "The noise made it seem like a plane was crashing down on us but when you looked it was more like a big ball of flame - something red, red, red as if the whole country had caught fire. One Regla resident, Odalys Diaz, 51, said her neighbour was killed when the roof of a nearby five-storey building came crashing down onto his which then collapsed on top of him.

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Cuba prides itself on suffering relatively few deaths in hurricane season due in part to an exact evacuation scheme. Yet the tornado took Havana by surprise, although state-run media had warned residents that an approaching cold front from the north and winds from the south would create high winds, thunderstorms and heavy rainfall in the area. Rubiera was later cited as saying that such phenomena were virtually impossible to predict when they affected such concentrated areas. 

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