Tropical Storm Ernesto threatened to regain hurricane strength as it bore down on southeastern Cuba yesterday on a track toward the Florida Keys after killing at least one person in Haiti.

Ernesto, which was downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday after skirting southern Haiti, was drenching Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, with flooding rains. Cuba, facing its first big storm in decades without its ailing leader, Fidel Castro, at the helm, evacuated 300,000 people from eastern provinces where the storm was expected to hit the Sierra Maestra mountains later yesterday. Florida, storm-weary after eight hurricanes in the past two years, declared a state of emergency and ordered tourists out of the vulnerable Keys almost a year to the day since Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans.

Oil prices fell yesterday after Ernesto weakened to a tropical storm. But several oil companies moved personnel from rigs off the Gulf Coast, where a quarter of US oil and gas is pumped. Forecasters said Ernesto, which had become the year’s first hurricane early on Sunday when its top winds reached 75 mph (119 kph), was very near the southern coast of eastern Cuba later yesterday morning, bringing more torrential rain and large battering waves. The US National Hurricane Center said advisory that Ernesto was expected to regain strength as it moved away from Haiti’s mountainous terrain “and could become a hurricane as it approaches southeastern Cuba.”

Ernesto’s center was about 70 miles from Guantanamo at Cuba’s southeastern tip, with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph (85 kph), the Miami-based hurricane center said. The storm was moving northwest at 9 mph (14 kph).Tens of thousands of Cubans were transported from coastal and mountain villages in buses and trucks. But beach resort hotels on keys off Cuba’s north coast, where the storm is expected to enter the Florida Straits today, said they had not decided whether it was necessary to evacuate hundreds of European tourists.

In Haiti, a woman died after huge waves from Ernesto’s storm surge swept ashore on the southern island of Ile-de-Vache and destroyed her home. There was an unconfirmed report of another death in the port city of Gonaives, where tropical storm flooding killed 3,000 people two years ago. Ernesto was flooding streets throughout Haiti and destroyed at least 13 homes on the island of La Gonave, officials said. Residents of battered New Orleans breathed easier as the season’s first hurricane looked like it would miss the historic jazz city.