After hurricanes, 2 quakes jolt Cuba
HAVANA—Two powerful earthquakes rocked southern Cuba in quick succession on Sunday, US geologists said, just days after the island was struck by a hurricane that knocked out power nationwide.
The quakes cracked walls and damaged homes, but did not appear to have caused any deaths, according to preliminary reports.
They left many residents running into the streets and badly shaken so soon after the passage of Hurricane “Rafael,” a category 3 storm, which struck the island last Wednesday.
“It’s the last thing we needed,” Dalia Rodriguez, a housewife from the town of Bayama in southern Cuba, told Agence France-Presse (AFP), adding that a wall of her house had been damaged.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) measured the second, more powerful tremor on Sunday at magnitude 6.8 and 23.5 kilometers deep, some 49 kilometers (25 miles) off the coast of Bartolome Maso, in southern Granma province.
It came just an hour after a first tremor, which the USGS put at a magnitude 5.9.
The quakes are the latest events in a cycle of emergencies for the communis-run island following two hurricanes and two major blackouts in the last three weeks.
The island suffered a nation-wide blackout on Oct. 18 when its biggest power plant failed and it was then hit by Hurricane Oscar two days later.
The effects of last week’s Hurricane Rafael have sparked rare protests, with an unspecified number of people arrested, according to authorities.
Cuba has been suffering hourslong power cuts for months and is in the throes of its worst economic crisis since the breakup of key ally the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—marked by soaring inflation and shortages of basic goods.
‘People got scared’
The state-run newspaper Granma said no deaths had been immediately reported from Sunday’s quakes, but that they had been felt throughout eastern and central provinces of the Caribbean island nation.
“Here people quickly took to the streets because the ground moved very strongly,” Andres Perez, a 65-year-old retiree, said.
