After a long, restless night of howling wind and rain, residents of Nuevitas, Cuba, ventured out of their homes Saturday morning to inspect damage from Hurricane Irma.

“It’s a total disaster,” said Dianelys Alvarez, reached by cellphone in the central plaza of Nuevitas, where Alvarez said not a single tree remained standing.

Caibarien, Cuba, gets a dose of Irma's winds on Friday, while Havana, left, is battered by the storm surge on Saturday.

“The streets are full of rubble. There are houses with their roofs ripped off. Even the oldest trees in town have been knocked down,” she said.

The town has been without power for more than a day, but Alvarez said reports of damage elsewhere have been reaching her neighbors by word of mouth. She’s heard the destruction is even worse in the towns and beach resorts closer to where Irma made landfall late Friday as a Category 5 storm.

Still, Cuba appears to have been spared the devastation that Irma unleashed on the Leeward Islands to its east, where mass destruction has been reported, especially on the island of Barbuda, which was essentially obliterated.

There have been no reports of deaths or injuries in Cuba from Irma, but the storm continues to pound the north coast of the country’s central provinces. Cuban authorities said more than 1 million people were evacuated from the areas most vulnerable to the storm, including 36,000 tourists who were relocated to the capital, Havana, and other areas outside Irma’s projected path.

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