Earthquake rocks Cuba as residents struggle to recover from recent storms

Officials say efforts to assess damage are under way after 6.8-magnitude earthquake hits eastern Cuba.

A powerful earthquake has hit eastern Cuba, adding more problems to a country still reeling from a series of recent storms and blackouts.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported on Sunday that a magnitude 6.8 earthquake hit about 40km (25 miles) south of the town of Bartolome Maso. No deaths or injuries have been reported so far.

“There have been landslides, damage to homes and power lines,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a social media post, adding that the areas of Santiago de Cuba and Granma were affected.

“We are beginning to assess the damage in order to begin recovery. The first and most important thing is to save lives,” he said.

People in affected provinces have said the earthquake was one of the most powerful they have felt in their lives – no small feat in an area that the USGS says has experienced 23 earthquakes of magnitude 5 and above in the last 50 years.

“We’ve felt earthquakes in the past, but nothing like this,” Santiago resident Griselda Fernandez told the Reuters news agency.

Other residents in Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, reported that the quake caused buildings to shake and that many people were still standing nervously in their doorways.

“You had to see how everything was moving, the walls, everything,” Yolanda Tabio, a 76-year-old in the city, told The Associated Press.

Many of the region’s homes and buildings are older and vulnerable to earthquake damage.

State-run media published images of terracota roofs and facades of concrete block homes that had collapsed with the shake. Many images showed structural damage to ceilings, walls, windows columns as well as to public infrastructure.

The USGS said that nearby countries such as Jamaica also felt some effects.

The tremor is the latest in a series of natural disasters that have compounded existing infrastructure problems in Cuba, where large swaths of the population also face economic insecurity.

In October, Hurricane Oscar brought heavy rains and widespread power outages to the island and left at least six people dead after making landfall in eastern Cuba.

Another storm, Hurricane Rafael, knocked out power for at least 10 million people after slamming into the eastern part of the island last week.

The storm uprooted trees and knocked down telephone poles. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies