“There Was My Home,” the Lament of 10 Havana Families
victims of a new building collapse in the Cuban capital
It was a three-story building located in the Havana neighborhood of Santos Suárez and declared uninhabitable years ago.
HAVANA TIMES – With steel exposed to the sun, the facade turned into rubble, and dozens of residents and neighbors with anguished faces around it. This is how the building on San Bernardino Street, in the Havana neighborhood of Santos Suarez, looked on Monday morning. The building collapsed this weekend, leaving a ten families without a roof.
Seated in a wheelchair on the sidewalk across the street, a resident from the collapsed building pointed to the ground floor and said: “There was my home.” About twenty people had piled up on the street the few belongings they had managed to extract from the pieces of wall and twisted rebar: a mattress, a washing machine, and some pictures that once hung in the living rooms of homes that no longer exist.
A crane and several state employees had been demolishing the pieces of the three-story building for hours. The building had been declared uninhabitable years ago, but several families still lived there. They cut-off traffic and the residents were paying attention to every hammer blow on the walls, also covered by yellowish dust. “At first, they said they were going to demolish only the upper floors, but now they have announced that they will demolish the whole building,” the woman in the wheelchair told 14ymedio.
“My house is the one on the ground floor,” she noted, pointing to a part of the building, of which only the top of some windows could still be seen, as the rest was covered by a mountain of rubble. While she spoke, the crane lifted a cage with a worker who helped lower some belongings from the upper floors. Each item rescued was greeted with joy by the neighbors, but also with concern: “I don’t know if I’ll be able to recover my bed,” lamented a young woman holding a child in her arms.
Ignoring the voices warning them not to enter, some residents even ventured to sneak through the doors of a side corridor to try to rescue an appliance, a purse, or family photos stored in a drawer. They came out a while later with something in their hands and fear on their faces. “It’s bad inside, it looks like it’s going to keep collapsing,” warned a man who managed to evacuate several pairs of shoes and an electric pot.
The uncertainty of what will come after the demolition was also a topic of conversation. “Now, they’ll probably send us to a shelter, who knows where,” speculated one of the victims who had not yet been able to recover any valuable items from the collapsed walls. So far, the neighbors’ solidarity had provided them with water and some food, but the affected people know they can’t stay overnight in front of the ruins.
Building collapses are a frequent reality in the Cuban capital, especially when rain and bad weather soften the foundations of already-dangerous buildings. At the end of June, when Havana experienced several days of storms, at least 19 buildings suffered partial or total collapses, according to a source from 14ymedio who preferred to remain anonymous.
The collapse of a villa on 26th Street, in the Playa municipality, which was filmed by several passersby and neighbors, was one of the most widely spread in those days. It is estimated that there was at least one fatality and several injuries.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.