2. Death & Destruction
One
other fact which is important, especially if you want to go and visit Cuba one
day, is that there is a fault - or a bloody great crack in the Earth’s crust,
along the Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and the Cayman
Islands to the south of Cuba. This crack or fault is the deepest point in the
Caribbean Sea and forms part of the boundary between the so called North
American Plate and the Caribbean Plate.
 |
| Cuba Libre Beach |
This
all results in some frightenly deep and dark undersea trenches - some of which
are almost four kilometres deep (and one of these spooky trenches is a little over
seven kilometres deep). Volcanoes exist in the Caribbean, too - like Mount
Pelee, which, over one hundred years ago in 1902, killed about 29,000 people in
Martinique (this was the greatest loss of human life by a wicked volcano last
century - any previous loss of life was not recorded). Martinique, in case I
have you worried, is fairly close to Venezuela.
There
are also the occasional serious earthquakes In the Caribbean. One of them in
1692 destroyed Port Royal on the coast in Jamaica. One year later in 1693,
Havana got hit by one; and, as you will no doubt recall, Haiti was badly shaken
by an earthquake in early 2010 which killed around 300,000 people. For the record, there are 12 active faults
under Cuba and about 2,000 tremors each year (or ‘temblores’ in Spanish). Talk about the luck of the devil, or of a
just God, most of them do little damage to life or property, and they are not
usually felt by normal people.(to be continued)
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