Swoan Parker / Reuters

Former Haitian Dictator Jean Claude "Baby-Doc" Duvalier, center, listens as charges against him are announced during an appeals court hearing in Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Duvalier appeared in court on Thursday for the first time to face charges he was responsible for corruption and serious human rights violations during his 15-year rule.

Individual government officials "had their own authority," the 61-year-old Duvalier said when asked about his role as head of state from 1971 to 1986. "Under my authority, children could go to school, there was no insecurity."

Duvalier, who had boycotted three previous court hearings, struck a mostly defiant tone during a four-hour grilling by a panel of three judges in a packed and sweltering courtroom.

Duvalier, dressed in a navy-blue suit and tie, slipped into the courthouse unescorted early on Thursday, arriving in his own car several hours before the hearing started accompanied by his longtime companion Veronique Roy. 

'Long live Duvalier'
Hundreds of Duvalier supporters gathered outside the courthouse soon after his arrival, some dancing and chanting "Long live Duvalier."

The pretrial Appeal Court hearing was held to determine what charges Duvalier may have to face. It is the first time he has personally been required to address crimes allegedly committed during his rule. 

International human rights observers are closely watching the case and consider it an important test of Haiti's weak justice system after decades of dictatorship, military rule and economic mayhem.

"Whatever happens next, Haitians will remember the image of their former dictator having to answer questions about the repression carried out under his rule," said Reed Brody, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch. 

During the hearing Duvalier was asked by the judges about more than a dozen of the most notorious cases involving alleged extra-judicial killings and detention of political prisoners.

'Calm, almost indifferent'
"He was asked tough questions and his answers were mostly evasive," said Amanda Klasing, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who attended the hearing.

"He was very calm, almost indifferent. His facial expression didn't change at all," she said.

Several alleged victims were in court and expressed satisfaction that he had finally appeared.

"He will have to face history in court, just like other dictators around the world are facing," said Alix Fils-Aime, who was imprisoned by Duvalier's government.

The hearing was adjourned in the afternoon and is set to resume next Thursday.

Reynold Georges, who heads Duvalier's legal team, had argued unsuccessfully at a hearing last week that his client's presence in court was not required.

Duvalier was briefly detained on charges of corruption, theft and misappropriation of funds after returning to the impoverished Caribbean nation in January 2011 following a 25-year exile in France. Those charges are still pending.

Separate charges of crimes against humanity filed by alleged victims of wrongful imprisonment, forced disappearances and torture under Duvalier, were set aside by a judge last year because the statute of limitations had run out. 

But the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, has warned Haitian authorities that there is no statute of limitations under international law for serious violations of human rights.

Return from exile
Critics say prosecutors have been too lenient in Duvalier's case. President Michel Martelly's government recently renewed Duvalier's diplomatic passport, saying he was entitled to it as a former head of state.

Duvalier, who inherited the title "President For Life" at the age of 19, is alleged to have fled Haiti with more than $100 million stashed in European bank accounts in 1986 after street demonstrations and riots broke out in a number of cities. 

His departure ended nearly three decades of dictatorship begun by his father, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, in 1957. 

The Duvaliers enforced their rule with the aid of a feared militia, the National Security Volunteers, better known as the "Tonton Macoutes," who were blamed for hundreds of deaths and disappearances. 

Soon after he returned to Haiti in 2011, taking up residence in a villa in a posh suburb in the hills above the capital Port-au-Prince, Duvalier issued a brief apology "to those countrymen who rightly feel they were victims of my government," the first public recognition of abuses under his rule. 

While in exile, Duvalier acknowledged privately that killers in his government went unpunished, according to Bernard Diederich, a New Zealand-born journalist and author of several books on Haiti, including a biography of the younger Duvalier. 

"He always passed the blame to others," said Diederich, who conducted four long interviews with Duvalier in the late 1990s.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- For the past three years Hugh Locke has been conducting an unusual experiment in Haiti, creating a new development model for a people who have known profound hardships for many years – and who are facing a headwind of more misery this year.

Experts believe Haiti is likely to experience a severe food shortage in 2013 -- beginning as soon as April -- though hunger is less likely to affect those who have participated in Locke’s experiment.   

Locke has about 30 years of experience in the developing world, where he used many of the same methods established by the foreign aid community.

Today he is strongly critical of the way most foreign aid is spent in developing countries, including Haiti.

"Imagine for a moment that the current rules of foreign aid were applied to the Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut," Locke wrote in a February blog post.

"In this 'foreign aid scenario,' overseas governments would step forward to provide the $50 billion in aid instead of the U.S. Congress.

Those foreign governments would each decide how their money was to be spent, and the U.S. and state governments would not be consulted.

Each government would bring in its own contractors and its own charitable organizations to implement the recovery efforts, with almost no money going to local groups or contractors. And when the funding stopped, all activities on the ground would stop and the resulting projects would collapse.

With few exceptions, this is how foreign aid is given out by wealthy countries to poor countries the world over. Is it any wonder that it is not having the intended impact?"

Locke -- a Canadian whose background is in forestry -- had an epiphany while embarking on a new tree-planting effort in Haiti.

An enormous part of Haiti’s energy comes from trees that are turned into charcoal. The charcoal is used not just for domestic cooking but also in industry. Who knew that a dry cleaner could be powered by charcoal? Over decades, Haiti’s countryside has been stripped of most of its trees; and with them, vital protection for agricultural topsoil has also been stripped. The nutrient-rich topsoil -- on which crops grow -- has been washed away in floods and storms, crippling the nation’s fragile agricultural production. More recently, it has also been further devastated by weather systems such as Superstorm Sandy.

To stop this topsoil erosion and to help give Haiti’s farmers a chance to produce abundant crops, Locke wanted Haitians to plant trees. But he wasn't sure how he was going to persuade farmers struggling to grow crops to get involved in a forestry project. What would be their incentive? And how would he satisfy his sponsor -- Timberland’s Jeff Swartz – who insisted Locke create a business model that would continue to function after Timberland’s project funding stopped? What Swartz was asking went against most of the established development tenets.

Locke explains that the current practice in foreign aid is to give out money for short-term projects with measurable results, even if a longer program can be shown to build local capacity. "Giving out fish is preferable to teaching people how to fish," he wrote.

"At the same time, there is a rule in foreign aid that those with the money, whether governments or non-profit organizations, can deliver any given service more effectively and efficiently than the local people being helped. The problem is that both of these approaches tend to create a dependency on handouts, and this is particularly true in Haiti."

Helping Haitians help themselves
In a state of conflict and some confusion, Locke came up with a radical idea that would become an ingenious experiment.

Locke calls his model exit strategy aid – and, in Haiti at least, it is a radical departure from classic development paradigms fusing ideas derived from established aid models with hard-nosed business practices.

We recently traveled to Haiti to see Locke’s experiment underway. We left Port-au-Prince early in the morning, but not early enough to avoid the Haitian capital’s gridlock, which seemed a fitting metaphor for a country that doesn’t seem able to move forward, no matter how much traffic there is on its roads.

Leaving the city we soon encountered a surprising smooth asphalt road – which, we remarked, was better than many of the roads in the United States. The road, it turned out, had been constructed by a foreign contractor and was paid for by foreign aid. While it seemed to be a noble effort, it troubles Locke, who said:       

“A road that is built by donor money using foreign contractors is never going to be fully a part of the national transportation system. So it will not be maintained. It will always be absolutely dependent on foreign funding on every aspect of its creation and its maintenance forever.”

Locke wanted to break that pattern and encourage Haitians to help themselves.

After two and a half hours driving north, past the fertile soils of the Artibonite Valley, we saw an aid project three years in the making.

In early 2010 Locke and his Haitian partner Timote Georges struck a deal with 2000 small-scale farmers near Gonaives in the north of Haiti: if they formed a cooperative and made a commitment to plant trees, Locke would give them robust seeds for their crops as well as farming tools and training.

Not only would the farmers benefit from improved crops, his theory went, but the cooperative to which they belonged would also be able to sell the trees at a profit – a profit that would be shared. Right at the beginning, Locke decided funding for the project would stop in early 2013, giving the farmers a precise target to hit. The “agro-forestry” project had to be successful by then because at that time Locke would walk away.

It was an audacious plan but is it working? Locke is tracking the progress of the exit strategy aid project on his website.

Locke’s effort in Haiti coincides with a new outside recognition that foreign aid practices in Haiti must change. It is a sentiment echoed by one of the most prominent and knowledgeable figures in Haiti's aid landscape, Paul Farmer, who co-founded Partners In Health, and who has worked in Haiti for three decades.

“If I had been asked 30 years ago, when I first started coming to Haiti, how best to direct international aid to address disease and poverty, my answer would not have been what it is today," Farmer wrote in a recent UN report. "Working in partnership with non-governmental organizations felt right in the early 80s, the third decade of a dictatorship."

"My belief now is that the only way to create durable and transformative change—to break the cycle of disease and poverty affecting the lives of millions of Haitians—is through direct investment in and accompaniment of national and local institutions that confer basic rights.”

The State Department has issued a revised Haiti travel advisory, warning Americans planning to travel to the Caribbean island nation about robbery, lawlessness, infectious disease and poor medical facilities.

"U.S. citizens have been victims of violent crime, including murder and kidnapping, predominantly in the Port-au-Prince area. No one is safe from kidnapping, regardless of occupation, nationality, race, gender, or age," the department said.

The new travel warning was released Friday to replace a less strongly worded advisory issued in June.

In recent months, travelers arriving in Port-au-Prince, the capital and largest city, on flights from the United States have been attacked and robbed after leaving the airport. This year, at least two U.S. citizens were shot and killed in robbery and kidnapping incidents, the State Department said.

"Haitian authorities have limited capacity to deter or investigate such violent acts, or prosecute perpetrators," the department said.

The State Department also noted that while the incidents of cholera have declined, the disease persists in many areas of Haiti. Medical facilities, including ambulance services, are particularly weak.

"Thousands of U.S. citizens safely visit Haiti each year, but the poor state of Haiti's emergency response network should be carefully considered when planning travel. Travelers to Haiti are encouraged to use organizations that have solid infrastructure, evacuation, and medical support options in place," the department said.

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Updated at 6 p.m. ET: Tropical Storm Isaac was hugging the northern coastline of eastern Cuba on Saturday after claiming at least four lives in Haiti. Isaac should become a Category 1 hurricane on Sunday just as it nears the Florida Keys, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said, and then grow into an even stronger Category 2 storm with 100 mph winds.

Isaac "could be significantly stronger than currently forecast" once it enters the Gulf of Mexico, the center said in an advisory.

It will first sweep past southwest Florida and the Florida Keys, where "hurricane conditions are expected ... Sunday," it said in a separate update.

Republicans effectively cancel first day of convention

Isaac is a massive storm, with tropical storm-force winds extending 230 miles from the center. Key West International Airport was halting all flights at 7 p.m. Saturday until the storm had passed.

In Haiti, a woman and a child in the town of Souvenance were killed in the storm, a local official reported. A woman in the southern coastal city of Jacmel was crushed to death when a tree fell on her house, government officials said.

In the capital Port-au-Prince -- where some 350,000 people are still living in tents or shelters after the 2010 Haiti earthquake -- a girl, 10, was killed when a wall fell on her.

Power outages and flooding were reported as Isaac moved across the hilly and severely deforested Caribbean country.

"There's a lot of rain, a lot of wind," said Magdala Jean-Baptiste, who huddled with her frightened children in their home in the southern coastal city of Jacmel. "We haven't had any power since the storm started yesterday. We passed the night with no sleep." 

In neighboring Dominican Republic, Isaac felled power and phone lines and left at least a dozen towns cut off by flood waters. The most severe damage was reported along the south coast, including the capital Santo Domingo, where more than half the city was without power.

Cuba prepared by closing beaches and evacuating tourists in vulnerable areas, NBC's Mary Murray and The Weather Channel's Mike Seidel reported from Havana. Flights across Cuba were also suspended. 

In Baracoa, a city on Cuba's eastern side, high seas began topping the seawall Friday night, Radio Baracoa reported. 

Now with 60-mph winds, Isaac should exit Cuba on Sunday and then move south of the Florida Keys and into the Gulf.

Dieu Nalio Chery / AP

Residents wade through a flooded street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Saturday.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Saturday declared a state of emergency to make sure local and state agencies would be ready. Republicans effectively canceled the first day of their national convention in Tampa, on Florida's central Gulf Coast, deciding to gavel it open on Monday, then immediately recess to some time on Tuesday.

Gulf of Mexico operators began shutting down offshore oil and gas rigs on Friday ahead of the storm. 

Follow Isaac's path with our storm tracker
Live updates and analysis from weather.com

Tampa's weather forecast includes rain and high winds Sunday night and into Monday, The Weather Channel reported. The winds could gust up to 60 mph.

Monday and Tuesday include a risk of tornadoes across south Florida. 

Officials were handing out sandbags to residents in the Tampa area, which often floods when heavy rainstorms hit. Sandbags also were being handed out in Homestead, 20 years after Hurricane Andrew devastated the community there. Otherwise, however, convention preparations were moving ahead as usual.

Isaac's exact path is still unclear, but the hurricane center said models suggest it will make landfall somewhere between the Florida Panhandle and New Orleans on Tuesday night.

The storm's anticipated path did shift closer to the Keys than previously forecast and emergency managers urged tourists to leave the islands if they could do so safely. A single road links the chain of islands to the Florida Peninsula. 

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Slideshow: Isaac tracks toward Florida

Walter Michot / AP

Tropical Storm Isaac rakes the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba as it makes its way toward Florida, where Tampa will be hosting the Republican National Convention.

Launch slideshow

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Updated at 7:40 a.m. ET: Tropical Storm Isaac dumped heavy rains on Haiti on Saturday, threatening floods and mudslides in a country where hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless more than two years after a devastating earthquake.

Lashing rains and high winds were reported along parts of Haiti's southern coast and in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, where more than 350,000 survivors of the 2010 earthquake are still living in fragile tent and tarpaulin camps.

Intermittent power outages affected the greater Port-au-Prince area in the early hours of Saturday as Isaac bore down on the impoverished Caribbean country.

At 5 a.m. ET, the U.S. National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane warning for the Florida Keys, including the Dry Tortugas, the west coast of Florida from Bonita Beach southward and Florida Bay.

It also issued a hurricane watch notice for Florida’s east coast from Golden Beach southward.

The NHC also said the Bahamas government had issued a hurricane watch for Andros Island.

The NHC's notice at 5 a.m. said Isaac had maximum sustained winds of 60 mph, down from 70 mph earlier Saturday, and was about 150 miles southeast of Guantanamo, Cuba.

'Life-threatening flash floods'
The Weather Channel reported that bands of heavy rain triggered flooding in Puerto Rico through Friday, even with Isaac's center well to the southwest. A bridge collapse and mudslide was reported early Friday. Power outages were also reported. The U.S. Virgin Islands were also affected.

The Weather Channel said heavy rainbands on the cyclone's eastern flank were expected to continue to hammer Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  

Follow Isaac's path with our storm tracker

Storm total rainfall of 8 to 12 inches is possible, with up to 20 inches locally, The Weather Channel said. Additionally, 4- to 8-inches of rainfall, with isolated incidents of 12 inches, was possible in Jamaica.  

"Life-threatening flash floods and mudslides will likely result from that amount of rain," it warned.

Aid workers prep Haiti's tent city residents for Isaac's onlsaught

Isaac's march across the Caribbean comes as U.S. Republicans prepare to gather in Tampa, on Florida's central Gulf Coast, for Monday's start of their national convention ahead of the November presidential election.

The convention is still expected to proceed as planned but Gulf of Mexico operators began shutting down offshore oil and gas rigs on Friday ahead of the storm.

But the biggest immediate concern was heavily deforested Haiti.

On Friday, the government and aid groups evacuated thousands of tent camp dwellers but many Haitians chose to remain in their flimsy, makeshift homes, apparently out of fear they will be robbed, said Bradley Mellicker, head of disaster management for the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

"There's a lot of people who are resisting because they are scared of losing what little they have now," Mellicker said.

Churches, schools are shelters
About 3,000 volunteers from the government's Civil Protection office were dispatched across Haiti, warning people about flood and landslide risks, and about 1,250 shelters -- schools, churches or other community buildings -- that have opened their doors to house people seeking refuge from the storm.

But Red Cross officials said the number of shelters could be grossly inadequate and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe acknowledged Haiti had "limited means" to ensure public safety.

Red Cross and IOM representatives joined government officials in trying to evacuate 8,000 of the "most vulnerable people," including 2,500 sick and disabled, from 18 tent camps in low-lying coastal areas of Port-au-Prince.

Live updates and analysis from weather.com
Transcript of weather.com experts answering Isaac questions 

Many Haitians, most of whom scrape by on less than $1 per day, consider disaster an inevitable part of life in the poorest country in the Americas.

"We live under tents. If there's too much rain and wind, water comes in. There's nothing we can do," said Nicholas Absolouis, an unemployed 34-year-old mechanic at one camp for homeless people on the northern edge of the chaotic capital.

"There are still too many people living in the camps. There's a good chance that those might be destroyed with the passage of the cyclone," said France Hurtubise of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Haiti.

Flooding could also help reignite a cholera epidemic, which has killed more than 7,500 people in Haiti since the disease first appeared in October 2010, foreign aid workers said.

Could hit New Orleans
On its current path, forecasters said Isaac would hit Cuba and the southern tip of Florida before making landfall anywhere from the Florida Panhandle in the northwestern part of the state to Alabama and as far west as New Orleans.

A tropical storm warning was issued for the entire coast of south Florida on Friday, and a hurricane warning also went into effect in the Florida Keys.

Isaac has drawn especially close scrutiny because of the Republican Party's convention, a four-day meeting during which former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will receive the party's presidential nomination.

Party officials insist the convention will go ahead, even if they have to alter the schedule. But NHC meteorologist Rick Danielson said Tampa could potentially be hit by coastal flooding and driving winds or rain.

"There is still a full range of possible impacts on Tampa at this point," he said.

Danielson said it was very hard to project intensity before Isaac passes over mountainous Cuba on Saturday and Sunday and enters the Florida Straits. But the Florida Keys, the island chain off the southernmost part of the state, were definitely in harm's way.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti – As the winds picked up strength in Haiti, concern grew Friday among dozens of aid workers trying to prepare more than 400,000 tent city residents to face Tropical Storm Isaac.

Gallons of water and emergency kits were loaded swiftly into trucks at the American Red Cross headquarters in Port au Prince.

The head of the organization in Haiti, Sandrine Capelle Manuel, said her main concern is flooding and mudslides.

Handout / Reuters

Members of the International Organization for Migration register displaced people who will take shelter at a school before the arrival of Tropical Storm Isaac in Port au Prince, Haiti, on Friday.

“Over 80 percent of the people are living under the poverty line, and a lot of people are living on no-built areas on the bottom of a ravine,” she said.

Just a few miles east, at a camp in the suburb of Pétion-Ville, hundreds of earthquake survivors received leaflets with drawings showing how to better secure their tents during the storm. They have been homeless since January 12, 2010, when an earthquake crumbled their homes and took more than 200,000 lives.

Chiara Lucchini Gilera, is the Camp and Relocations Program Manager for J/P HRO, the relief organization trying to help those evacuees survive Isaac.

Isaac to hit Haiti overnight; tropical storm watch for southern Florida

Live updates and analysis from weather.com
Transcript of weather.com experts answering Isaac questions 

Follow Isaac's path with our storm tracker

“I expect to find people without places, with lots of things washed away,” Gilera said.

Workers for the non-profit organization founded by American actor Sean Penn plan to shelter the most vulnerable -- the handicapped, pregnant women and the elderly -- at the camp school, but the rest will have to be turned away because there is not enough room.

The American Red Cross estimated there are at least 557 tent cities remaining in Haiti since the earthquake and no place for most of the people in those camps to seek shelter.

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Updated at 11 p.m. ET: Tropical Storm Isaac strengthened on Friday as its lashing rains took aim at flood-prone Haiti, but it was not expected to become a hurricane until it barreled into the Gulf of Mexico early next week. 

On its current path, forecasters said Isaac would hit Cuba and the southern tip of Florida before making landfall anywhere from the Florida Panhandle in the northwestern part of the state to Alabama and as far west as New Orleans.

Forecasters put the entire coast of south Florida under tropical storm watch as of 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) on Friday.

But the biggest immediate concern was heavily deforested Haiti, where the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the full force of the storm was expected to be felt later Friday.  

Isaac could pass near Florida's Gulf Coast early Monday just as the Republican National Convention is scheduled to start in Tampa. 

Winds at tropical storm strength extend 185 miles out from Isaac's center, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in an afternoon advisory, making it a very wide storm.

On exiting Haiti, Isaac's center should cross Cuba on Saturday, and then pass south of the Florida Keys before making landfall as a Category 1 hurricane overnight Tuesday somewhere between New Orleans and Tallahassee, NBC meteorologist Al Roker said Friday on TODAY. Warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico will be "energy for the storm" as it makes its way across the gulf, he added.

In related developments Friday:

• The U.S. embassy in Haiti sent an e-mail to American citizens in the country warning that flights into and out of Port-au-Prince have been suspended due to Isaac.
• Oil and gas producers in the Gulf of Mexico started preparing as Isaac's track looked to skirt the heart of the U.S. offshore energy producing zone. BP said it would shut down its giant Thunder Horse platform, the world's largest. Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and Apache Corp. said they would evacuate some workers from their Gulf platforms with no production impacts. Other offshore drillers were likely to shut production in coming days as the storm approaches.
• The U.S. military moved 22 F-16s from Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida to Fort Worth, Texas. Three F-15s from the base are on alert to move to Jacksonville if necessary.

South Florida could see a few twisters and heavy rain -- some 5-10 inches Sunday and into Monday, weather.com experts said in an online chat with readers Friday.

Florida has not been hit by a major hurricane since 2005 and officials are concerned that residents there have become complacent.

Aid workers prep Haiti's tent city residents for Isaac's onlsaught

"I think it's a challenge of getting people to understand their risk and make sure they’ve got a plan," said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

With more than 19 million people living across the Sunshine State, Fugate wants every Florida resident to have enough supplies to last 72 hours and to know when to evacuate.

Click this image to get to our Atlantic storm tracker.

"I think the most dangerous thing is when people keep waiting to see what the next forecast is even if they’re in an evacuation zone. They say, 'Oh, it’s just a Category 1 storm or a minimum hurricane.' We’ve seen significant impacts from tropical storm force winds and rain," Fugate added.

In the Florida Keys, where there are few routes available for evacuation -- U.S. 1, Key West International Airport, and the Florida Keys Marathon Airport -- Mayor Craig Cates said his biggest concern was the storm's timing. Cates said he would need at least 36 hours to begin evacuations of tourists and residents.

"If it (Isaac) comes straight on to Key West, we’re worried about the damage that could happen in Key West. If it goes further up the Keys, it could damage power lines and we could get affected," Cates said. "Even if it hits further up the state, we have got to be prepared with our generators and our supplies. Being on an island, we understand that."

Forecasters with The Weather Channel think the evacuation decisions could come quickly. It is anticipated that watches will be issued for South Florida and the Keys by Friday night. In the event of an evacuation, Cates told The Weather Channel that tourists would leave first, followed by special needs citizens. 

Live updates and analysis from weather.com
Transcript of weather.com experts answering Isaac questions 

Florida Gov. Rick Scott said state officials are working with convention organizers, who will ultimately make the call on a delay or cancellation of the event.

State officials announced Thursday that they will wait to make decisions about moving supplies until after Isaac passes Cuba. FEMA has already placed food and generators in Jacksonville.  

Isaac is forecast to remain a tropical storm after crossing the Dominican Republic and Haiti and then passing over Cuba into the Florida Straits.

The National Hurricane Center warned it was "important not to focus on the exact track because of forecast uncertainties and the fact that Isaac has a large area of tropical storm force winds."

Follow Isaac's path with our storm tracker

Isaac was expected to dump between 8 and 12 inches of rain over parts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and up to 20 inches in a few areas. That poses a significant threat to Haiti, which is highly prone to flooding and mudslides because of its near-total deforestation.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, still has about 350,000 people living in tents or makeshift shelters more than 2-1/2 years after a devastating earthquake that took more than a quarter of a million lives.

Red Cross workers toured crowded tent camps of Haitians left homeless by the 2010 quake to warn about Isaac.

Authorities in the Dominican Republic evacuated people living on the banks of rivers, streams and areas vulnerable to landslides in preparation for the approach of Isaac, whose effects were beginning to be felt with showers in the south of the country.

Weather.com and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Updated at 1:15 a.m. ET: Tropical Storm Isaac brought rain and gusty winds to Puerto Rico on Thursday as it passed south of the U.S. territory. It is forecast to remain a tropical storm after crossing into the Dominican Republic and Haiti and then passing over Cuba into the Florida Straits, the National Hurricane Center said.

Forecasters said it was too soon to gauge Isaac's potential impact on Tampa on Florida's Gulf Coast, where the Republican National Convention is to run from Monday through Thursday.

Related: Track Tropical Storm Isaac

Some computer models showed Isaac shifting slightly to the west and eventually moving parallel to Florida's western coastline. Others forecast the storm to make landfall in South Florida and then move inland.

Isaac was centered late Thursday evening about 145 miles southwest of the Dominican Republic's capital of Santo Domingo, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm had top sustained winds of 45 miles per hour.

The storm is expected to dump between 8 and 12 inches of rain over parts of Hispaniola, with total accumulations up to 20 inches in some areas, the Hurricane Center said.

The Bahamas issued tropical storm warnings for its southeastern areas; Cuba issued tropical storm warnings for several provinces, including Guantanamo.

The largest threat was the potential for extremely heavy rainfall over the islands near Isaac's path, weather.com reported.

The Red Cross was ready in Haiti to help evacuate people to shelters and camps but was in a "wait and see" mode, Jerry Anderson, senior director of international services, told NBC News.  

Residents and visitors of the northern Caribbean, Yucatan Peninsula, southeastern United States and the central/eastern Gulf Coast should watch the progress of Isaac closely over the next week or more, weather.com reported.

Get the latest on this story from weather.com

As the storm approached, Puerto Rico Governor Luis Fortuno declared a state of emergency, canceled classes, closed government agencies and activated the National Guard.

The government also froze prices on basic necessities such as food, batteries and other supplies and prepared emergency shelters at schools and other facilities.

Heavy rainfall, flooding and mudslides will be threats in all of the northern Caribbean islands regardless of how strong the system becomes, weather.com reported.

Isaac may also threaten U.S. energy interests in the Gulf of Mexico, weather experts said.

From weather.com: Isaac's looming US threat

At the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in southeast Cuba on Wednesday, authorities said Isaac forced the postponement of pretrial hearings that were to begin on Thursday for five prisoners accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks.

The U.S. military was preparing flights to evacuate the base of lawyers, paralegals, interpreters, journalists, rights monitors and family members of 9/11 victims who had traveled there for the hearings.

In Key West, Fla., Mayor Craig Cates told NBC News that officials were monitoring Isaac but hadn't made any decisions about evacuating because the storm hadn't yet strengthened. All agencies were preparing in case an evacuation would be needed if the storm gets strong, he said.

From weather.com: Track Isaac's path

Coordinating Meteorologist Tom Moore at The Weather Channel said it was difficult to predict how Isaac would affect Tampa when the Republican National Convention to nominate Mitt Romney gets under way on Monday.

Because the storm was tracking farther south than earlier predictions, it could track to the west side of the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend, he said. That would leave Tampa facing rain and thunderstorms with20-30 mph winds gusting up to 40 mph on Monday.

Tropical Storm Isaac churns over Caribbean, could threaten GOP convention

Orange juice prices rise
Florida has not been hit by a major hurricane since 2005 and forecasts showed Isaac was not expected to strengthen beyond a weak Category 1, with top sustained wind speeds of about 80 mph.

The threat to Florida triggered a nearly 6 percent jump in orange juice prices on Wednesday as they surged to a six-week high in trading in New York.

Florida produces more than 75 percent of the U.S. orange crop and accounts for about 40 percent of the world's orange juice supply.

Lurking behind Isaac, the hurricane center said Thursday another tropical depression grew into Tropical Storm Joyce, the 10th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Located about 1,280 miles east of the Leeward Islands, it was packing winds of 40 mph and was moving northwest at 14 mph on Thursday afternoon.

Forecasts predicted it will eventually veer toward the open Atlantic and away from the Caribbean. No coastal watches or warnings were in effect for Joyce.

Reuters and weather.com contributed to this report.

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