The Mexican government flew soldiers and federal police into the resort city of Cancun to bolster local police overwhelmed by the devastation and the crime wave Wilma left in its wake.

As tens of thousands of foreign tourists and local Mexicans scrambled to leave the city, its airport reopened Tuesday only for emergency aid flights and to ferry out tourists and people with serious injuries.

A French tour operator, Nouvelles Frontieres, said in Paris Tuesday it had chartered aircraft to bring home hundreds of French, British and Belgian tourists stuck in Mexico.

In Cuba, where injury and damage reports remained sparse, authorities said they were beginning to send back some of the nearly 800,000 residents evacuated from the west end of the island in advance of the storm.

In southern Florida some three million clients remained without electric power and several cities and counties declared curfews to prevent any outbreak of looting.

At least 18 people were reported dead in the storm's violent passage from the Yucatan to Florida before it headed north, away from land, over the Atlantic Ocean.

Four were killed in Florida, according to the Miami Herald, including two men killed by falling trees, one woman by flying debris and another man by a collapsing roof.

Another four people, including three foreign tourists, were reported dead in Cuba in a bus accident as they evacuated Friday before the storm slammed the island.

Ten others were killed in various incidents in Mexico, where Wilma hovered almost motionless for 36 hours, blasting winds of 160 kilometers (100 miles) an hour through the world-famous resorts of the so-called Mexican Riviera.

Electricity and telephone services were partially restored in areas of the premier resort of Cancun Tuesday, where looters had brazenly walked into shops and homes on Sunday and Monday to carry off everything of value.

On Tuesday Cancun's mayor ordered people to stay at home after 7 pm local time while federal police and soldiers beefed up street patrols.

A curfew was also ordered on Cozumel, the resort island off the Cancun coast.

"The situation is now under control," said Ruben Aguilar, spokesman for Mexican president Vicente Fox.

"The city police were overwhelmed," he said.

However, the city and surrounding area remained wrecked by the storm, with 260 high-tension power line towers toppled and more than 10,000 smaller electric poles blown down, said Aguilar.

In a normal hurricane in the region, he said, only ten of the high-tension towers would be felled.

Yucatan area hoteliers called for heavy federal aid to restore operations for the all-important winter season. Aguilar said aid of some 500 million dollars had been requested to get them back into business quickly.

Jesus Almaguer, head of the Quintana Roo hotelier association, predicted it would take three to four months to get back to normal after the storm left 95 percent of the hotels uninhabitable, due mainly to downed infrastructure.

But Wilma also wiped out 28 kilometers (17 miles) of the region's gleaming sandy beaches, officials said. "Now the only thing left is the sun; it is a destination of sun and stones," city councilman Alain Serrat told the Reformation newspaper.

In Havana, several main roads remained closed as the country began counting the costs Tuesday of a storm which flooded parts of the city after bursting over levees.

Along the coast walls of buildings had crumbled into the ocean, the massive waves and storm surge shifting even huge blocks, weighing several tonnes each, of the retaining wall at Havana's legendary Malecon seafront.

According to civil defense officials, in Santa Fe west of the capital, 2,000 homes were submerged by the flooding and another 2,000 were damaged.

In Florida, the acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Paulison, urged tens of thousands of people who evacuated to wait until authorities give the green light to go home.

"Please, please don't go back until the local emergency managers tell you it's safe to go back," Paulison said in a news conference.

Florida and federal authorities launched a massive aid effort to supply food, ice and other necessities to those affected by the storm as President George W. Bush declared a major disaster in the southeastern US state.

"We have prepositioned food, medicine, communications equipment (and) urban search-and-rescue teams," the president said Monday.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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