Havana Cuba. – Building number 1353 on Calzada de Diez de Octubre, in La Víbora, is one of the many buildings in the city about to collapse. More than 30 years ago it was declared uninhabitable, but inside it remain more than 10 families who, with nowhere else to move, fear dying buried by tons of rubble.
For tenants, the live dawn is a kind of luck with expiration time. Each detachment of the structure is a warning signal that stirs nerves, especially after the collapse of last October 17 on Sol street in Old Havana, where a five-year-old girl died and two other people had to be hospitalized.
“We don’t want that for our children. Not for adults, of course. We don’t even sleep anymore, it’s all the time with one eye open and the other closed, the situation is indescribable. And I think we have the right to live,” said Liudmila Romero Fernández, a mother of two children. Eight other children live in the building.
As the latest official data, in 2020 a total of 854 multi-family buildings in poor condition were recorded on the Island, 696 of them in the capital, and consequently, a total of 849,753 affected. The lack of official data makes it impossible to know the number of people who come to the institutions to ask for help. However, the 33 adults who live in building number 1353 on Calzada de Diez de Octubre are part of that statistic.
The fear of losing their lives and the indifference of the authorities to this possibility led the residents to seek support in the independent press. In November 2021 CubaNet public a report about the situation of the building, but to date nothing has changed.
Ada Rodríguez Martínez is one of the longest-standing residents in the building, built in 1903. According to her account, at the beginning of the 1970s, steps were taken to repair the second-level tenements, since the first floor was occupied by state-owned businesses dedicated to sale of alcoholic beverages, and an ice cream parlor.
However, the aid for maintenance was never approved, and in the 1990s – he does not remember exactly – the first partial collapses occurred. The Housing and Physical Planning directorates then declared the place uninhabitable, which already had cracked walls and ceilings and a collapsed floor.
For 30 years, tenants have had to throw biological waste and other household waste onto the Calzada de Diez de Octubre. The permanent humidity that seeps through the cracks swelled the walls. Meanwhile, the ceilings drop a piece every day and the floors shake, even with the steps of the children.
“There is nothing missing for this to bury us. A few days ago a piece of the roof almost fell on top of three children who were playing in the hallway. The terror is constant because you have to watch what comes from above and tread with silken feet so as not to fall with the roof and everything down,” commented Esteban Morejón, who argues that in the last six years no official has visited the building.
Only 13 cubicles of the cuartería are still inhabited. The high strut of the construction facilitated the adaptation of barbecues that turn them into small apartments. Another 24 cubicles, destroyed inside, are closed or function as a deposit for rubble, tanks, broken tables and chairs, and other unusable junk. The former owners were transferred to shelters or went to the homes of relatives.
In 2004, the Government of Diez de Octubre promised to gradually provide new shelter capacities for the rest of the nuclei that remained living in building 1353. According to Eloísa Tamayo Diéguez, it was not until 2016 that five families were sent to a former women’s prison on the outskirts of the Novia del Mediodía district, in the municipality of La Lisa.
“That had no bathrooms, electricity, doors or windows. They were empty, dirty ships, equal to or worse than this. In a week, everyone was back here,” said Tamayo, before assuring that the people who made subsequent efforts were “punched by the Government of Diez de Octubre and the province. The Prosecutor’s Office and Housing never came back to life, and the delegate only happens when there are elections, so that we don’t miss out”.
The portal of the building several years ago was shored up without a warning sign to divert the hundreds of passers-by who cross it daily. At the end of August, the neighbors refused to shore up one wing of the building, to strengthen its structure in the face of the imminent passage of Hurricane Ian through western Cuba.
“If one wing falls off, the whole building falls down. If this goes down and kills us, they know they’re responsible for crossing their arms. Let them say no more that there are no resources because every month a new hotel comes out. Oh, for tourists there is, ”said Sabarí Puentes, a tenant who has suffered several eviction attempts along with her two children.
“There are only two options: go live in a park or stay and God wants us to be out when this collapses,” the woman concluded.
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