At least 56 people died in the Dominican Republic, many of them swept away in muddy floodwaters after two rivers burst their banks and tore through the village of Villa Altagracia outside Santo Domingo.
At least 27 more were listed as missing and more than 50,000 people had been driven from their homes by chest-high floods, emergency operations officials said.
Dozens of communities were cut off by mudslides and downed bridges and the Dominican government appealed to other countries to send helicopters so that people could be rescued in isolated communities. President Leonel Fernandez declared a state of emergency.
Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and is even more vulnerable to flash floods and mudslides because most of its trees have been cut down to make charcoal, reported at least 24 deaths. In Jamaica, one person died when a house collapsed because of heavy rain.
In Cuba, thousands were evacuated from vulnerable areas and reservoirs overflowed, but no deaths were reported.
U.S. forecasters projected the 14th named storm of the 2007 Atlantic storm season would veer northeast over the Bahamas on Thursday, well clear of U.S. oil and gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico.
A hurricane watch was issued for the northwestern Bahamas in case Noel strengthened into a minimal Category 1 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
The storm was located about 110 miles (175 km) southwest of Nassau in the Bahamas, and 175 miles (280 km) southeast of Miami at 8 a.m. (1200 GMT), the hurricane center said, and it was drifting slowly northward.
Tropical storm Noel has come just 2 months after Hurricane Felix devastated vast areas across Nicaragua and Honduras, leaving more than 200 people dead or missing, and tens of thousands homeless.
