After hurricanes, two earthquakes jolt crisis-hit Cuba

Two powerful earthquakes rocked southern Cuba in quick succession on Sunday, U.S. 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 AFP, adding that a wall of her house had been damaged.

The US Geological Survey measured the second, more powerful tremor on Sunday 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.

The quakes are the latest events in a cycle of emergencies for the Communist-run island following two hurricanes and two major blackouts in the last three weeks.

The island suffered a nation-wide blackout on October 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 hours-long 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 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.

Other residents in Bayamo, a city of some 140,000 people, described street poles swaying.

"People got 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.

Hurricane Rafael left residents in Cuba without power for two days.

With concerns of instability on the rise, President Miguel Diaz-Canel has warned that his government will not tolerate attempts to "disturb public order."

Local prosecutors said Saturday that an unspecified number of people had been arrested after demonstrations in the wake of Hurricane Rafael.

Around 85 percent of residents of the capital had had their power restored on Sunday, according to the government, while the two worst-hit provinces in the west, Artemisa and Pinar del Rio, remain in the dark.