Cuba has been plunged into darkness after its electrical grid collapsed due to destruction caused by Hurricane Ian.

Cuba’s electricity grid has collapsed, leaving the entire country without power in the wake of Hurricane Ian, as residents in Florida braced for the arrival of what is expected to be a catastrophic Category 4 storm.

The western end of Cuba was hit by violent winds and flooding on Tuesday, affecting infrastructure, state-run media reported, while some of the country’s most important tobacco farms were devastated.

Cuba’s National Electricity Union said that power would be restored gradually on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Lázaro Guerra Hernandez, from the Electric Union of Cuba, said people were working through the night and that power would be gradually restored. He called it “an exceptional condition – a total of zero” electricity generation. “We are starting the process of restoring the system. It’s a process that takes time, it must be done with precision,” he said.

The island’s decades-old electrical grid has been faltering for months, with blackouts common, but officials said the storm had proven too much, provoking a failure that shut off the lights for its 11.3 million people.

The country’s key Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant “could not be synchronised”, a journalist with a state-run news agency was reported as saying, leaving no electricity generation on the island.

Earlier, the hurricane tore through the west of the country on Tuesday morning, making landfall in Pinar del Río province, where officials set up 55 shelters, evacuated 50,000 people and took steps to protect crops in the nation’s main tobacco-growing region. The storm left at least two dead in western Cuba, state-run media reported.

Many buildings on tobacco farms had been flattened by the storm, state-run media said. Farmer Abel Hernandez, 49, said: “It destroyed our houses, our drying huts, our farms, the fruit trees, everything.”

Businesses in Florida, meanwhile, were shuttering and officials ordered 2.5 million people to evacuate before it crashes ashore Wednesday.

The powerful storm is heading directly for Florida’s south-western coast, after striking Cuba with winds of 125mph (205km/h). The storm is expected to intensify in strength as it moves over the Gulf of Mexico and west of Florida’s southern tip on Tuesday night, before heading toward the Tampa Bay region.