HAVANA, Nov 8 (Reuters) - A man drowned crossing a river in eastern Cuba where heavy rains and flooding in the wake of Tropical Storm Noel caused $500 million in damages to crops, roads and houses, the Cuban government said on Thursday.

It was the first death reported by Cuba as a result of the torrential rains dumped on its eastern provinces last week by Noel, the deadliest storm of 2007, which killed at least 142 people on other Caribbean islands.

Yusmani Tames died trying to cross a swollen river in Granma province, where floods after Cuba's biggest river, the Cauto, burst its banks, the government said in a statement published by the Communist Party newspaper Granma.

It said 22,000 houses had been damaged or destroyed, and thousands of kilometers of roads flooded.

Authorities confirmed the death of 57 people in Haiti and 85 in the Dominican Republic, where 48 people remained missing after the storm unleased mudslides and floods that drove some 80,000 people from their homes.

Cuba evacuated more than 80,000 people from flooded areas last week. By Thursday, half had still not been able to return home.

Rains continued in the province of Holguin, where flooding forced the Cuban nickel industry to shut down one of its three processing plants. Nickel is Cuba's top export product.

Cuba lost 10 percent of its coffee crop due to Noel, which drenched eastern provinces already saturated by two weeks of persistant rainfall.

Officials said 50,000 hectares (123,550 acres) of sugar cane fields were flooded or damaged by the storm in the eastern half of Cuba, which accounts for half of Cuban sugar output. The floods could delay the start of the sugar harvest, they said.

Cubans said the flooding caused by Noel was the worst they had seen since Hurricane Flora hovered over eastern Cuba for several days in 1963. Flora was blamed for 1,200 deaths. (Reporting by Anthony Boadle, editing by Jackie Frank)

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