By Makini Brice

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – Hurricane Matthew strengthened on Friday into the Caribbean’s first major hurricane in four years as it moved towards Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba with winds of up to 115 miles per hour (185 km/h) that could cause devastating damage, forecasters said.

Matthew was about 495 miles (800 km) southeast of Kingston, Jamaica, and the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) designated it as Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.

It is forecast to make landfall as a major storm on Monday on Jamaica’s palm-fringed southern coast, home to tourist resorts as well as the capital and Jamaica’s only oil refinery.

The last major hurricane in the region was Sandy, in 2012.

In Haiti, which has been hard hit by natural disasters in the past, officials said preparation efforts were focussed in the south of the country. Matthew is forecast to skim past the south coast on Monday.

“We will prepare with drinking water for the patients, with medication, with generators for electricity, available vehicles to go look for people at their homes,” said Yves Domercant, the head of the public hospital in Les Cayes in the south.

In Cuba, which has a strong track record of keeping its citizens out of harms way when storms strike, residents of the eastern coastal city of Santiago de Cuba said they were tracking the news closely, although skies were still blue.

“We don’t know yet exactly where it will go, so we’re still waiting to see,” said Marieta Gomez, owner of Hostal Marieta, who was following the storm closely on TV and radio. “We Cubans are well prepared.”

The storm killed one person in St. Vincent and the Grenadines earlier in the week.

(Reporting by Makini Brice, additional reporting by Sarah Marsh in Havana and Vijaykumar Vedala in Bengaluru; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; editing by Grant McCool)