"Dangerous" late-season Hurricane Paloma pounded the Cayman Islands as it intensified in the Caribbean and set a collision course with storm-battered Cuba, forecasters said.

The Cayman Islands, a British territory with major tourism and banking interests south of Cuba, hunkered down, closing shelters and urging residents to stay put in the face of Paloma, which strengthened into a Category Three storm.

At 10pm (3am GMT) Paloma's centre was 40 kilometres southeast of Grand Cayman and about 405 kilometres southwest of Camaguey, Cuba, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said.

"Dangerous, major Hurricane Paloma" was whipping maximum sustained winds of 185 kilometres per hour, pounding Grand Cayman and heading toward Little Cayman and Cayman Brac, the NHC said.

"Paloma is a Category Three hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Some slight is possible tonight and early on Saturday morning," it said.

Paloma was churning northeast at 11 kilometres per hour and was expected to slam into Cuba's central coast late on Saturday, said the centre.

Time to stay indoors

Shelters on Grand Cayman were closed by mid-afternoon Friday to "ensure the safety of people in the shelters and also ensure that persons get off the roads," local authorities said in a statement.

It is "time to stay indoors," said Donovan Ebanks, chairperson of the National Hurricane Management Council.

Acting Police Commissioner David George urged residents to "stay in their homes or rest shelter (and) only leave if you really really have to."

Coming toward the end of the Atlantic hurricane season, which stretches from 1 June to 30 November, storm surge flooding on the Caymans was expected of up to 3.6 metres at Paloma's centre.

The storm would likely produce rainfall of 12 to 25 centimetres across the Caymans and central and eastern Cuba, with up to 38 centimetres in some places, the NHC said.

Tracking northeast to strike Cuba's south-central coast late on Saturday, and with Havana still reeling from a devastating storm season, Paloma would be the fifth to crash into the island this year.

The island began mobilising its defenses in readiness for the tempest — preparing total evacuations of low-lying regions and coastal cities on the southern coast, prepping medical teams and equipping shelters for residents and up to 3000 foreign tourists.

Cuba declared a hurricane warning for its central and eastern provinces on Friday, covering Sancti Spiritus, Ciego de Avila, Camaguey, Las Tunas, Holguin, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo, civil defense officials said.

In Holguin province, the area most devastated by Hurricane Ike in September, head of the region's Civil Defense Council Miguel Diaz-Canel ordered emergency measures to protect life and property.

A little unexpected

Gladys Sanchez, a resident of Minas, north of the central city of Camaguey told AFP by telephone that "no one had expected another hurricane".

"There are people here who are still homeless," she said, adding that local residents had just begun to recover from the previous storms.

"It has been raining here since morning — everything is dark," she said.

The 2008 hurricane season, including devastating Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, has killed hundreds across the Caribbean and Central America and wrought billions of dollars in damage across the region.

Gustav and Ike, which struck Cuba on 30 August and 9 September, caused an estimated $9.3-billion in damage, almost double the original estimates, according to official reports.

In the Caribbean's most populous island nation, with more than 11 million people, the storms have damaged some tourism infrastructure and destroyed about 80 percent of crops.

AFP