Forecasters said Fay was expected to strengthen on Sunday and could be hurricane strength when it passes over Cuba and zeros in on Florida, where officials declared a state of emergency.

A hurricane watch was issued for the Florida Keys and parts of south Florida on Sunday.

The US National Hurricane Centre in Miami said that at 0900 GMT (5pm Singapore time) on Sunday the centre of the storm was about 715 kilometres southeast of Key West, Florida.

It was moving toward the west-northwest at 21 kph, with maximum sustained winds at 80 kph.

In Cuba, officials in the eastern province of Santiago advised farmers to move livestock to higher ground and were preparing to evacuate tourists from low-lying coastal areas, the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported on its Web site.

Cuba's government said a hurricane watch was in effect for the island from the province of Matanzas east to Sancti Spiritus, and a tropical storm warning was in effect for Guantanamo Bay.

Fay's path was expected to take it near the southern coast of the island on Sunday and over western Cuba on Sunday night or Monday.

A man died on aturday in Haiti while trying to cross a river in Leogane, south of Port-au-Prince, said Marie Alta Jean-Baptiste, head of Haiti's civil protection department.

Rice fields in the Artibonite Valley, Haiti's most fertile region, were flooded, according to reports from Radio Ginen. And Fay's heavy winds destroyed banana crops in Arcahaie, north of the capital, although it is unclear how many acres were affected, Jean-Baptiste said.

Haiti has struggled to cope with a food crisis that sparked deadly riots in April.

In neighboring Dominican Republic, a 34-year-old woman drowned when her family tried to cross a swollen river in a car, civil defense agency director Luis Luna Paulino said.

The bodies of her missing 13-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew were found on Saturday afternoon, but her husband swam to safety.

A tropical storm warning has been issued for the Cayman Islands, and a tropical storm watch remains in effect for the Bahamas and Jamaica.

In Florida, Governor Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency. Fay 'threatens the state of Florida with a major disaster', he wrote in an executive order.

Residents and tourists in the Florida Keys prepared for the storm, which forecasters said could strengthen to a hurricane and begin battering the island chain as soon as Monday.

Forecasters predicted that the sixth named storm of the 2008 season would make landfall in the US somewhere along western coast of Florida on Tuesday as a hurricane, said Corey Walton, a hurricane support meteorologist at the hurricane centre. -- AP