Two powerful earthquakes shook southern Cuba on Sunday, U.S. geologists said, just days after the island was hit by a hurricane that knocked out power across the country.
The earthquakes cracked walls and damaged houses, but did not appear to cause any deaths, according to preliminary reports.
They left many residents running in the streets and severely shaken shortly after Hurricane Rafael, a Category 3 storm, hit the island last Wednesday.
“This is the last thing we needed,” Dalia Rodriguez, a housewife in the southern Cuban town of Bayama, told AFP, adding that a wall in her house had been damaged.
The US Geological Survey on Sunday measured the second, more powerful quake, measuring 6.8 magnitude and 23.5 kilometers deep, about 25 miles off the coast of Bartolomé Maso, in the south of the province. from Granma.
It occurred only an hour after a first tremor, estimated by the USGS at a magnitude of 5.9.
The earthquakes are the latest in a cycle of emergencies for the communist-ruled island, following two hurricanes and two major power outages in the past three weeks.
The island suffered a nationwide blackout on October 18 when its largest power plant failed and was subsequently hit by Hurricane Oscar two days later.
The effects of last week’s Hurricane Rafael sparked rare protests, with an unknown number of people arrested, according to authorities.
Cuba has suffered hours-long power outages for months and is in the grip of its worst economic crisis since the breakup of its key ally, the Soviet Union, in the early 1990s, marked by soaring inflation and shortages. of basic products.
– “People were afraid” –
The official Granma newspaper said no deaths were immediately reported following Sunday’s quakes, but they were felt across all eastern and central provinces of the Caribbean island nation.
“Here, people quickly took to the streets because the ground was moving very strongly,” Andres Perez, a 65-year-old retiree who lives in central Santiago de Cuba, told AFP by telephone about the first earthquake.
“It was really very strong, my wife is a bundle of nerves,” he added.
“There are houses with cracked walls, others have seen their walls collapse and some have seen their roofs collapse,” Karen Rodriguez, a 28-year-old hairdresser from Caney de las, told AFP. Mercedes, a small town in Bartolomé Maso.
Other residents of Bayamo, a town of about 140,000, described street poles swaying.
“People were scared, everyone ran out of the houses, very scared,” Livan Chavez, a 24-year-old welder, told AFP.
The U.S. Tsunami Warning System said no tsunami warning had been issued.
Hurricane Rafael left residents of Cuba without power for two days.
Faced with growing fears of instability, President Miguel Diaz-Canel warned that his government would not tolerate attempts to “disrupt public order”.
Local prosecutors said Saturday that an unknown number of people had been arrested after protests in the wake of Hurricane Rafael.
About 85 percent of the capital’s residents regained electricity on Sunday, according to the government, while the two worst-affected western provinces, Artemisa and Pinar del Rio, remain in limbo.
bur-st-adp/dw
