Peeling walls, cracks in the ceilings of several apartments and, above all, structural cracks keep the 21 families who live in a building on San Nicolás street near the corner with Salud, in Centro Habana, in suspense. “This building was built in 1948 and has never been touched. It was reported for maintenance in 2004, architects from the community came, did the lifting and we are still waiting for them,” he tells 14ymedio Miladis, one of the residents of the place.
The 2019 tornado damaged the corner of a room in the apartment of this habanera. “When I informed the municipal government, an architect came and told him that I needed to find a way to knock down the damaged wall and rebuild it, so that it would not fall into an access corridor of the building. And do you know what the architect told me? That it was my problem if a piece of concrete fell on someone’s head. “
Like Miladis, many residents of the building have the will to fix their homes, but due to the high prices of construction materials – due among other causes to the inflation that the country is experiencing – they do not have the means to carry out repair work independently. .
The problem is repeated throughout the neighborhood, with the exception of some houses where the recent painting on the facade reveals a private business, a private hostel that is preparing for the arrival of tourists or the existence of an emigrant in the family who sends those dollars with which you can still get some products to repair homes.
However, Miladis had to make urgent repairs because, over time, water from the downpours began to seep into the same room that was damaged in the tornado. “I had to sacrifice myself and have a hard time with food to buy a couple of bags of cement and fix that corner,” he says. “It was a repair on the outside of the apartment and whoever did the maintenance had to expose himself to the danger of hanging himself in order to fix the damaged area.”
For about two years, various building materials have disappeared from state stores. The only option to get the products at the moment is the informal market, where for example a bag of cement exceeds 1,000 pesos, or go to the foreign currency stores, where it costs 10 dollars and is scarce.
The fear that her apartment will collapse is not only what worries Miladis the most: the other houses are in the same situation and the structures of the entire property have begun to give way. “The building is exposed to saltpeter, its proximity to the sea makes everything worse.” Indeed, the buildings near the Malecón suffer especially the effects of the sea and none of the various government programs have solved the problem of frequent landslides.
In front of the Miladis building there was a house on the second floor in very poor condition and its owner had to demolish it with his own efforts, because he never received help from the capital’s government, the woman recalls. “It was a scandal because the neighbor threw all the rubble onto the street and they wanted to fine him, but he got in 3 and 2 and the authorities had to send for the rubble to be collected. “
As in the case of Miladis, there are thousands in the capital, which will be 502 years old on November 15. When asked what solution he saw for his building, he was blunt in his answer: “What is needed is another government.”
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