New Building Collapse in Havana Leaves 15 Families Homeless
It occurred on Reina Street; an elderly woman was seriously injured
It happened in the former headquarters of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, once a hub of international trade, later turned into tenement housing after 1959.
HAVANA TIMES – Armchairs, refrigerators, and furniture filled the stretch of portal this Tuesday in front of a building on Calle Reina, between Manrique and San Nicolás Streets, in Centro Habana. The partial collapse that occurred Monday in the property has left one person hospitalized and residents unable to return to their homes, according to 14ymedio’s reporting.
Fifteen families, nearly 50 people, lived in the building, and most had to spend the night outdoors. The collapse of part of the tenement’s structure occurred “at dawn, after six in the morning,” one resident told this newspaper. Others spoke of a noise “like thunder” that shook the entire building. In reality, there was hardly time to react. “Today no one has come,” added the woman, referring to the authorities.
The crash surprised many in their beds and drove them into the street in T-shirts and flip-flops, many with panic still etched on their faces. Images of part of the collapsed roof inside quickly circulated on social media.
The scene repeats itself far too often in the Cuban capital: a structure gives way, the desperate scramble to save the essentials, followed by resignation at the irretrievable loss. After the collapse comes demands for space in a shelter or access to any premises that can serve as housing. But the possibilities are slim.
On the portal of the central avenue, residents have piled up the belongings they managed to salvage from the debris: folded clothes in plastic bins, mattresses smelling of damp, a couple of fans, and the occasional half-broken piece of furniture. A neighbor places a microwave atop his other belongings as if it were a relic, while a woman fans herself with the lid of a cardboard box, seated on the chair she managed to rescue from the collapse.
The only seriously injured person is an elderly woman identified as Magaly, 75, who suffered several fractures, including one to her collarbone, when part of the third-floor ceiling fell onto the second. She was rushed to the hospital.
This Tuesday, pedestrians walking that stretch of Reina were forced to step off the sidewalk and continue along the avenue, given the crowd of residents and their belongings still blocking the portal. A tape with the initials of the National Revolutionary Police cordons off the site.
The affected property is no ordinary building. It is the former headquarters of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, located at Reina 161, between Manrique and San Nicolas, in the heart of the old Chinatown. In its heyday, it was the institution that grouped merchants, importers, and owners of large grocery warehouses. Chronicles describe it as a nerve center of business and meetings, a symbol of a thriving community that left its mark on Havana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
From 1959 onward, nationalizations and the exodus of thousands of Chinese and their descendants brought about the closure of associations and the transformation of their premises into housing. This was the fate of the Chamber: offices were divided into small apartments, and over time, walls erected to create improvised rooms multiplied the weight on structures already weakened by age and lack of maintenance. What had been a symbol of transnational commerce became a maze of narrow corridors, shored-up ceilings, and beams begging to be replaced.
Havana lives under the shadow of these collapses. It is neither an isolated nor an unpredictable phenomenon. Each downpour is a harsh test that many buildings fail. Every summer, social media and independent media outlets fill with words like “collapse,” “partial cave-in,” or “structural damage.”
The tragedy of these collapses is not measured only in fallen walls or families on the street but also in lives cut short too soon. Just a few weeks ago, little Alejandra Cotilla Portales, seven years old, died alongside her parents when a collapse on Calle Monte buried their home. Alejandra, who attended a drawing workshop at the Centro Loyola Reina, had put on paper the house of her dreams, with firm roofs and impossible figures for her reality. Her death, mourned by teachers and classmates, became a heart-wrenching symbol of what it means to grow up in a city where living under an old roof can be riskier than sleeping outdoors.
The solutions offered are usually improvised: temporary shelters in disused schools, relocation to relatives’ homes, promises of future resettlement that rarely materialize. Affected families face the immediate: where to sleep tonight, how to protect their few belongings, who will care for the elderly or the children.
The Reina Street collapse reflects the broader deterioration of Havana’s housing stock, a city with an aging real estate inventory and no resources to maintain it. According to official estimates, hundreds of thousands of homes require major repairs, but materials are scarce, and bureaucracy delays any effort.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.