Hurricane Irma lingered along Cuba’s north coast Friday, swamping seaside towns and shredding the island’s rickety infrastructure, though there were no reports of deaths or injuries.
Cuban authorities said they had moved more than a million people out of Irma’s path, sending them to an extensive network of shelters that included dozens of caves.
After Irma made landfall late Friday as a Category 5 storm — the most powerful to strike the island in nearly a century — it began to slacken. By late afternoon, it was a Category 3 system, moving westward at a plodding pace of just 9 miles per hour, meting out destruction across a huge swath of the island.