With wind gusts of up to 145 miles per hour, Hurricane Matthew made landfall Tuesday on Haiti's southwest coast, flooding streets and sending many Haitians to emergency shelters. News reports say that within hours of the Category 4 storm striking the Haitian coast, it was responsible for three deaths and another in Jamaica.

According to experts, this is the region's strongest storm in nearly a decade and the worst hurricane to hit Haiti since Inez in 1966.

In the country's largest slum, the seaside Cite Soleil in capital Port-au-Prince, Mayor Frederic Hislain called on the government to bus 150,000 people to safer places whose homes he said were threatened.

"Those people are living all along the seashore in a bunch of huts which usually can't even really protect them from ordinary rain. Now we are talking about a strong hurricane. Imagine the disaster we may have to face here," according to Reuters.

In Les Cayes, about 150 people huddled without electricity or food in the city's largest shelter, a school meant to house 600. Trash was already littered on the balconies.

Jamaica's Kingston saw light showers most of the morning on Monday, with gray, overcast skies. At a nearby beach there were huge waves and crowds were gathering to film them from drones and cellphone cameras.

In both Jamaica and Haiti, authorities shut the main airports to wait for the storm to pass.

In Cuba, which Matthew is due to reach Tuesday, evacuation operations were well underway, with most tourists in the eastern town of Santiago de Cuba moved inland and given instructions on where to shelter in hotels during the hurricane.