An earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale struck near western Cuba on Monday afternoon, shaking buildings in Havana and Florida as far away as Orlando.
No injuries or material damage were reported.
According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake occurred at a depth of 26 kilometers in waters west of the capital of Cuba, AP writes.
Flavia Pupo, a hotel manager in Pinar del Rio in western Cuba, described how the building shook, causing fear among people.
Sobre la 1:00 pm de este 8 de junio un terremoto de 6.1 shook México y Cuba: el Canal de Yucatán, approximately 104 kilometers al oeste-noroeste de Mantua, en el extremo occidental de Cuba, según datos preliminares del Servicio Geológico de Estados Unidos.
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— EL TIEMPO (@ELTIEMPO) June 8, 2026
“Everyone here is fine,” she said over the phone. “People on the street are a bit scared.”
The National Weather Service in Miami reported that ground shaking was reported across Southwest Florida. Numerous social media posts indicated that people felt the tremors as far north as Orlando.
Maria Moncayo, who works at a law firm in downtown Fort Lauderdale, said she was working quietly at her desk when she felt the vibrations.
She compared them to the sounds of construction work in another part of the building, and the shaking lasted for about a minute.
“I have a little pendant hanging on my desk and it moved,” Moncayo said. “That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t me, my chair or anything like that.”
Moncayo said that during her life in Ecuador, she experienced several earthquakes, including a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 2016, which killed hundreds of people.
However, she hasn’t felt one since moving to Florida seven years ago.
“Since I moved here, I completely stopped thinking about it, but when I felt my desk move, I thought it was going to be like in Ecuador,” she said.
“My memories came back, but then I realized that it was not serious, that it was a minor earthquake.”
Miami-Dade County officials said they evacuated several buildings as a precaution, including the county’s main administration building, a 28-story skyscraper in downtown Miami.
Traffic on the two city railway lines passing through the city center was also temporarily suspended.
William Barnhart, a geophysicist from the US Geological Survey, described the earthquake as an extremely rare event. It is the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico by modern instruments, which have been in use since the 1950s.
“It’s one of only five or six earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater that we know of that have occurred in the entire gulf,” he said.
This earthquake did not cause a tsunami. Barnhart explained that destructive sea waves caused by earthquakes and other underwater disturbances are more common in the Pacific Ocean, but can also occur in the Atlantic Ocean.
Western Cuba could feel strong aftershocks, but they are unlikely to be felt in Florida.
“There’s always a very small possibility that this could be followed by a larger earthquake that people could feel,” Barnhart said. “But Floridians should not expect significant shaking, or any shaking, from possible aftershocks.”
The Oriente fault zone is located just off the southeast coast of Cuba and has produced several devastating earthquakes over the past centuries, including the January 2020 magnitude 7.7 earthquake in the open sea, which caused damage in Cuba and the Cayman Islands.
(Vijesti.ba)
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