Two strong quakes jolt Cuba

Two powerful earthquakes rocked southern Cuba in quick succession on Sunday, US geologists said, sending Cubans running into the streets as authorities said no tsunami alert was issued and no deaths immediately reported.

The US Geological Survey put the second, more powerful tremor at a magnitude of 6.8 and 14.6 miles (23.5 kilometers) deep, some 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 of 5.9, with the epicenter some nine miles beneath the ocean roughly 22 miles off the municipality of Bartolome Maso.

The state-run newspaper Granma said no deaths had been immediately reported, but that the quake 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 who lives in downtown Santiago de Cuba, told AFP via telephone of the first quake.

"It felt very strong really, my wife is a bundle of nerves," he added.

"There are houses with cracked walls, others had walls falling down and some had their roofs collapsed," Karen Rodriguez, a 28-year-old hairdresser, told AFP from Caney de las Mercedes, a small town in Bartolome Maso.

Residents in Bayamo, a city of some 140,000 people near Bartolome Maso, described street poles swaying. "People did get scared, everyone came running out of the houses very scared," 24-year-old welder Livan Chavez told AFP.

The US tsunami warning system said no tsunami warning had been issued.

The tremor shook the island as it recovers from Hurricane Rafael, which hit the country's west as a Category 3 storm, leaving residents without power for two days.

A 5.1 magnitude earthquake was recorded in October 2023 in Santiago de Cuba, without causing any damage.

Another strong earthquake of magnitude 7.7 was recorded in January 2020 in the Caribbean and was felt in several Cuban provinces, causing the evacuation of buildings in the capital Havana, with no damage reported.