M5.9 Earthquake near Guamá, Cuba — 23 December 2024

Moderate earthquakes can damage poorly built or unreinforced structures near the epicentre, while well-engineered buildings typically escape serious harm. Shaking is often strong enough to wake sleeping residents over a wide area.

A magnitude 5.9 earthquake radiates roughly 10,676 tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 537, which is below the USGS threshold of more than 600 for its significant-earthquake list. The ranking combines magnitude with available Did You Feel It responses and PAGER alert level; it is not a direct measurement of damage.

That is about 00:54 local solar time at the epicentre, in the early hours of the morning.

This event was deeper than 82% of the 11 earthquakes recorded in Cuba in our catalogue and stronger than 73% of them.

The epicentre was located at 19.9162, -76.5153 — 37 km south of Guisa.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Bartolomé Masó (49 km west-northwest), Annotto Bay (185 km south), Manchioneal (215 km south-southeast) and Mona Heights (218 km south).

At 22 km this was a shallow earthquake. Shallow events release their energy close to the surface, so for a given magnitude they produce noticeably stronger shaking — and more damage — than deeper ones. Roughly three quarters of all earthquakes worldwide occur at shallow depths.

This catalogue does not ingest eyewitness responses, so it cannot confirm where this earthquake was felt. Based on magnitude alone, an event this size can be felt widely and may cause minor local damage. Its shallow focus makes stronger surface shaking more likely than for a deeper event of the same magnitude.

The USGS record does not carry a link to NOAA tsunami information. That field is not an all-clear and does not state whether a tsunami occurred. In this case, a damaging tsunami would be less likely because at M5.9 it falls below the magnitude 6.5 threshold that generally applies before a submarine earthquake displaces enough water to generate a damaging tsunami; it occurred inland rather than beneath the sea floor. For an active coastal alert, use tsunami.gov or your local warning authority.

No further earthquakes have been recorded within about 150 km of the epicentre in the seven days after this event.

1 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 5.0 event near Manchioneal on 10 February 2026. This M5.9 event released about 22 times more energy than that event.

1 earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, 1 of them in the past 30 days.

This earthquake is part of the December 2024 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in Cuba during December 2024. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.