“When we fall asleep, it is with the fear of not waking up”: Elisa Bacyan, 51, fears at any time dying in the collapse of the building where she lives with her daughter in Havana where buildings, due to lack of maintenance, regularly collapse. Elisa and Lesyanis, her 12-year-old daughter, live in a building in the old town. It is one of 700 buildings in the Cuban capital listed as being in critical condition. According to official figures, 37% of the country’s 3.9 million homes were in poor or very poor condition at the end of 2020.
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“I have already lost a child” illness, “I don’t want to lose my daughter”, says Elisa, who lives in “Residence Cuba”, a building from 1940 located in the district of “Habana Vieja”. The six-storey building, owned by the state, like the majority of buildings on the communist island, has 114 small rooms and is home to 92 families who do not have to pay rent. According to locals, the building was once an elegant hotel. Today, floors are crumbling, ceilings and passageways show their rusty metal skeleton, cracks and leaks are visible all over the walls.
146 partial collapses after the rains
children “can’t even play, because here every once in a while a piece (of the building) comes off”, laments Elisa Bacyan, tears in her eyes. Buildings collapse regularly in certain districts of Havana. In 2020, the fall from a balcony of a building in the old town caused the death of three little girls, arousing great emotion in the country. Other buildings continue to resist despite their deplorable state. A “miraculous aesthetic”quipped a building expert who requested anonymity.
“Cuban Residence” has “floor-to-ceiling structural defects” et “it is not recommended that people live there”underlines this specialist who predicts that “partial collapses will continue to occur there”. In this building as in many others, the construction of mezzanines, bathrooms and cisterns considerably increase the weight resting on the buildings.
There are also more rockfalls during hurricane season from June to November. The first rains of June caused 146 partial collapses of buildings and two in total in the capital, causing the death of a sixty-year-old man, according to official media. Cary Suarez, 57, arrived at “Residence Cuba” in 1997 after the building where she lived collapsed. She took her children to school but her mother died in the disaster. “Living through all this and being about to experience a new (collapse) is very difficult”she laments.
Sleep fully clothed
“We have exhausted all possible avenues and we have no answer”, explains Francisca Peña, 54, responsible for contacting the authorities on behalf of the inhabitants. She recognizes that the “the economic crisis that the country is going through makes everything more difficult”. The 50-year-old says she sleeps fully clothed in case she has to “run out” of the building and that it happened several times that all the tenants rushed outside after hearing a suspicious “noise”. “I have dark circles under my eyes, I don’t sleep, I live waiting for a section (of the building) to come off”says Luvia Diaz, a 50-year-old social worker who lives crammed on the top floor with her partner, her three daughters and a grandson.
Heavy rains in early June caused the ceiling in his bedroom to partially collapse, falling onto a bed. “If my daughter had been sleeping, there would have been a tragedy.” All the inhabitants share their fears but the story of “Pumpa”, 31, who refused to reveal her identity, is the most terrible. At two years old, sitting in the first floor hallway, she had a piece of ceiling hit on her head and had to undergo cranial reconstruction surgery. “I’m afraid to live here (…) because the second time I won’t survive”she said, cleaning her apartment.