Havana/Armchairs, refrigerators and furniture fill on Tuesday the piece of portal in front of a building on Reina Street, between Manrique and San Nicolás, Centro Habana. The partial collapse occurred on Monday in the building has left a hospitalized person and the neighbors unable to return to their homes, as he verified 14ymedio.
About 15 families were in the building, about 50 people, and most had to spend the night outdoors. The collapse of part of the structure of the Cuartía occurred “dawn, after six in the morning,” a resident explains to this newspaper. Others talk about a “like thunder” noise that made the entire building tremble. The truth is that there was hardly time to react. “Today nobody has come,” adds the woman, referring to the authorities.
Residents have piled up the belongings they managed to rescue from the debris
The rumble surprised many in their beds and took the neighbors to the street in t -shirts and flip flops, many with panic still reflected in the face. The images of a portion of the collapsed roof inside circulated quickly through social networks.
The scene is repeated too often in the Cuban capital: a structure that yields, the race to save the indispensable and then resignation to the unrecoverable. After the collapse arrive the claims for a place in a shelter or access a place that can serve as a housing. But the possibilities are few.
In the portal of the central avenue, the residents have piled up the belongings they managed to rescue from the rubble: bent clothes in plastic cubes, mattresses that smell to moisture, a pair of fans and the occasional half -to -break furniture. A neighbor places a Microwave above their other belongings, As if it were a relic, while a woman fans with the cover of a cardboard box, sitting in the chair that managed to rescue from the collapse.
The only serious wound is an old woman who identifies as Magaly, 75, who suffered several fractures, one of them in a clavicle, when part of the third floor roof fell on the second. They moved her emergency to the hospital.
This Tuesday, the pedestrians who traveled through that section of Queen were forced to get off the sidewalk and continue along the avenue given the agglomeration of neighbors and their belongings that still collapse the portal. A film with the acronym of the Revolutionary National Police surrounds the place.
/ 14ymedio
The affected property is not just any building. This is the former headquarters of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, located in Reina 161, between Manrique and San Nicolás, in the heart of the old Chinese neighborhood. In his time of splendor, it was the institution that grouped merchants, importers and owners of department stores of food. The chronicles describe it as a neuralgic business and meetings center, a symbol of a thriving community that left a mark in Havana of the late nineteenth and early twentieth.
As of 1959, the nationalizations and the exodus of thousands of Chinese and descendants precipitated the closure of the associations and the transformation of their premises into homes. This happened with the camera, the offices were divided into small apartments and, little by little, the walls raised to improvise rooms multiplied the weight on structures already fatigued by time and lack of maintenance. What was a symbol of transnational trade became a labyrinth of narrow corridors, with shore roofs and beams that shouting to be replaced.
The nationalizations and the exodus of thousands of Chinese precipitated the closure of the associations and the transformation of their premises into homes
Havana lives under the shadow of these landslides. It is not an isolated or unpredictable phenomenon. Each downpour is a hard exam that many buildings do not happen. Every summer, the news of social networks and independent media are filled with words such as “collapse”, “partial collapse” or “structural damage.”
The collapses drama is not only measured in fallen walls or families on the street, also in the lives that go out too soon. Just a few weeks ago, little Alejandra Cotilla Portales, seven years old, died with her parents when A collapse on Monte Street He buried his home. Alejandra, who participated in a drawing workshop at the Loyola Reina Center, had reflected the house of her dreams on paper, with firm roofs and figures impossible for her surroundings. His death, remembered with pain by teachers and classmates, became a heartbreaking symbol of what it means to grow in a city where living under an old roof can be more risky than sleeping outdoors.
Queen’s collapse reflects the general deterioration of the Havana Housing Fund
The solutions offered are usually improvised: temporary shelters in disused schools, transfers to family homes, promises of future resettlements that are rarely fulfilled. Wounded families face the immediate, where to sleep tonight, how to protect their few belongings, who takes care of the elders or children.
Reina’s collapse reflects the general deterioration of the Havana Housing Fund, a city with an aged real estate park and without resources to maintain it. According to official calculations, hundreds of thousands of homes require greater repair, but the materials are scarce and the bureaucracy delays any management.
