HAVANA -- Cuba began its 2008-2009 sugar cane harvest in the central province of Santiago de Cuba on time, despite the fact that the hurricanes that hit the island last season damaged hundreds of thousands of hectares of the crop, local media reported Sunday.

The Paquito Rosales sugar factory, in Santiago de Cuba, was the first to get started on this year's harvest, for which Cuban authorities are predicting similar results to last year in spite of the hurricane damage, the state-run AIN news agency said.

Hurricanes Gustav and Ike hit the island in early September, knocking down 156,600 hectares (391,500 acres) of the sugar cane crop and flooding another 519,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of Cuba's roughly 750,000 hectares of the crop.

In addition, 40,000 tons of not-yet-processed sugar in warehouses was drenched by the storms and had to be reprocessed to save it.

Three other sugar processing plants in Santiago de Cuba will get started on the harvest this coming week, and Jorge Lazaro Guerrero, the president of the Sugar Growers Business Group in the province said this year's harvest was kicking off with preparations "superior" to those of other years.

The harvest is being undertaken after on Nov. 25 President Raul Castro named Luis Manuel Avila to be the country's new sugar minister, replacing Gen. Ulises Rosales del Toro, who took over the Agriculture Ministry.

Del Toro said in October that Cuba hoped and expected that this season's production would be similar to that of last season.

He said that the island had managed to increase its sugar cane production to an average of 41.5 tons per hectare.

The 2007-2008 harvest came in at 28 percent higher than the year before, meaning that about 1.5 million tons of sugar was produced.

Cuba has restructured its sugar sector in two phases, in 2002 and 2004, reducing the number of processing factories from 156 to 61, eliminating more than 100,000 jobs and slashing cropland planted in sugar cane from 2 million hectares to just 750,000, according to government figures.