Evicted by a Fire, 36 Families Are Living on the Street
They’ve been sleeping outside for four days
They have no answers from the authorities, but they have a strong police operation to prevent the taking of photos.
By Juan Diego Rodriguez (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – The residents of the Hines building, located on Avenida del Puerto at the corner of Damas Street in Old Havana, have neither shelter nor answers after a fire broke out at dawn last Friday. What they do have is a heavy police presence surrounding them. At least four officers were visible in the area this Tuesday, marking the fifth day the families have spent outdoors.
Easily identifiable by his watchful attitude and usual outfit — t-shirt, cap, and backpack — one plainclothes officer stood talking to about a dozen residents who had placed beds and personal belongings under the building’s porticoes, where they now sleep, nearly exposed to the elements. On the other side of the building, another officer sat on the sidewalk, while a third kept watch from the entrance of a nearby café. A fourth, the only one in uniform, patrolled along the wall of the well-known San Jose craft market, adjacent to Hines.
“Was it hot last night?” the owner of the café asked a young girl who came by to buy lunch — one of the children affected by the fire. “We have a fan, but it was cool last night,” the girl replied, under the watchful eye of the security officer.
Another, younger child could also be seen among the neighbors, who have voiced their plight on social media and through various news outlets. According to a report by El Toque published Sunday, 48 hours after the fire, the flames completely destroyed four rooms in the building. The occupants lost everything. “They were left with nothing but what they had on. The little ones sleeping in their underwear because of the heat — that was all they had left,” said one affected resident.
The rest — a total of 36 families — were ordered to return to their rooms, which were not touched by the fire, but they refused. “The firefighters who were there said the structure could collapse,” El Toque noted, “and the authorities have washed their hands of it.” A person close to the victims explained: “They’re putting up lights in the hallways like that’s going to solve anything, even though they know the electrical system is damaged and was what caused the fire in the first place. Yesterday they tested the lights, but then they took the fuses away. It’s all a mess. This can’t be fixed — it has to be torn down completely.”
The victims are doubly evicted: the Hines building had been used to house people left homeless by building collapses, hurricanes, or family crises, and some had lived there for up to ten years. Now, they are spending day and night without electricity or water.
Ibisleybis Castellanos, who had been living there for nearly eight years, told Martí Noticias, “We knew it was going to happen — the power lines were overloaded, and there would be an electrical short.” According to that source, anyone trying to document the situation risks being detained. That was the case for Geovanis Blanco, who reported being fined for taking photos of the site. “They arrested me Saturday at six in the evening and released me at the same time Sunday. They fined me 7,000 pesos (US $19),” Blanco wrote on Facebook.
What happened was predictable. “Those people live in terrible conditions, always fighting with each other,” said a Havana resident from San Miguel del Padrón. “One time I was waiting for the bus next to that building and a huge fight broke out, the police even got involved.”
“My mom and sister live there,” one social media user posted. “The fire was due to the patchwork of electrical hookups they’ve got in that place. The wiring was meant for office use, not for people to live there, and it collapsed. There’s no life left there, but they’re still trying to rewire the burned cables so people can move back in, into a building that’s falling down.”
Another commenter added, “Poor people — my mother-in-law used to live there, and when there’s a fire it’s really dangerous, because there’s only one exit and way too many people, plus it’s not equipped for cooking.”
“There are no livable conditions here,” one Hines resident told Martí Noticias in a report from a year and a half ago. “There are six bathrooms in the shelter for around 460 people,” said another. “If something happens, we honestly don’t know where we’d go,” a third said, referring to a possible disaster. “One spark and it’s over,” she said, pointing to the precarious ceilings and miming throwing herself out the window toward the sea.
An elderly woman, Irene, recounted how she lost her previous home: it was on Vives and Revillagigedo, the building whose balcony collapsed in January 2020, killing three girls.
In another installment of the same series, the testimony of a different Hines resident was heartbreaking: she was willing to donate an organ in exchange for a roof over her children’s heads. She was immediately silenced by the authorities.
The images needed no voiceover: filthy bathrooms, crumbling walls and floors, unprotected wires and pipes hanging overhead.
That building, now unrecognizable, was once something else entirely — a structure built in 1939 by the United Fruit Company next to the San Jose warehouses, under the direction of engineer Emilio P. Guerra, with a beautiful art deco style. The massive US company used the building for storage, refrigeration, and office space. The area’s construction was part of a 1944 urban planning project aimed at expanding Havana’s roads to accommodate increasing traffic.
After the Revolution, the building, like all private property, was expropriated. It first became the property of the state-owned Asport Group and, since 1998, of the State Economic Organization Habana Inmuebles (Hines), which gave the building its current name. There’s no trace left of the sign identifying its owner, nor of the building’s former grandeur.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.