JAGUEY GRANDE, Cuba -- (AP) -- A truck rumbled over the potholed streets distributing much-needed milk for children and older people while water pump hummed nearby in this storm-ravaged community.

 "We are poor and the only thing we had is now gone,'' Ramon Guillen said Monday in this central Cuban city hard hit by Hurricane Michelle a week ago.

 "The water reached to a meter and a half (nearly five feet),'' he added, pointing to the place on the wall where the water rose inside his house, one of thousands seriously damaged by the heavy rains and winds of the storm that crisscrossed the island on Nov. 4.

 Residents in Jaguey Grande, some 100 miles southeast of Havana, are cleaning up homes, schools and businesses now that the water is receding.

 ``Now we are going to see what happened. I imagine all the citrus has been damaged,'' said Guillen, who like many in this region worked in orange and grapefruit orchards.

 Michelle ravaged hundreds of thousands of acres of sugar cane, shook loss tons of ripening bananas and other fruit from trees, and seriously damaged the electrical
 systems of sugar mills here in the central province of Matanzas, a key agricultural region.

 Sugar and citrus are two important sources of export income for Cuba's centralized economy. Tourism, Cuba's No. 1 source of hard currency income bringing in about dlrs 2 billion annually, appears to have escaped the worst effects of the storm.

 But that is little consolation to the people in this region, who depend almost exclusively on agriculture.

 Sugar Ministry officials say they are still trying to determine the overall damage to the upcoming sugar harvest, while much of the storm damaged fruit has already been converted into juice or distributed among citizens before it goes bad.

 Guillen, 34, with two teen-age children, is staying with a sister-in-law, returning to his home every day to clean out the mud so the family can move back in.

 ``We have to start from zero,'' said Guillen. ``There is nothing left here.''

                                    © 2001