2024-02-13 10:04:44
“Orientals, gay AIDS patients, the elderly, women with their husbands, children and people who have nowhere to live,” is how Yunier, one of those evicted from Factoría 70, between Corrales and Apodaca, in Old Havana, defined as expelled last year. January 31 due to the danger of the property collapsing. “They took us all out of the place like dogs.”
The almost hundred people who illegally occupied some 26 rooms of the building were evicted by the Police and several local government officials, says Yunier, with mistreatment and without guarantees, although not all versions of what happened coincide. “They told everyone to find, by their own means, a place where they could get into. They told them to go to their provinces. The only thing they put in was a warehouse to store things, so we found a place,” says the Havana native.
The belongings of the evicted will only be able to stay there for a month, explains Yunier. The young man does not forget how, around three years ago, the building – declared uninhabitable by the authorities – began to become populated. “The people who were arriving began to put up windows and doors, and to organize the rooms a little. Almost all of them were from Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo, although there were people from Havana.” The former inhabitants of the property, he explains, had previously been relocated to shelters.
“Orientals, gay AIDS patients, the elderly, women with their husbands, children and people who have nowhere to live,” is how Yunier, one of those evicted from Factoría 70, in Old Havana, expelled on January 31 by the danger of collapse pic.twitter.com/EWtTjyEiPN
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According to the Havana resident, none of those who lived in Factoría 70 received an eviction notice. The Police arrived on January 31, asked the residents for their identification cards and took them to the Dragones station. “They gave us fines and released us, and they said they were going to go the other day, but they showed up (that same day) at five in the afternoon,” Yunier remembers.
“The police wanted to finish before dawn, so that none of this would be known and people would not realize. The one who said we had to evacuate was a Dragones police officer,” says the young man. “Agents arrived on motorcycles and other vehicles,” as well as a superintendent of the Old Havana government who did not identify himself. Five other officials who accompanied him did not say his names either.
The eviction was tense, Yunier laments. “They threatened us. They said that if we didn’t leave, bigger things would happen.” The homosexuals bore the brunt and suffered several threats from the agents: “You keep quiet. You are birds and you don’t have a say in this.” Similar phrases were received, he affirms, by people who came from Santiago and Guantánamo, who were told that “they had to return to the East.”
Now the evicted are worried about the fate of their belongings in the “goods warehouse” where the local government ordered them to be stored. “So far there have been no losses of objects, but there may be,” he alleges.
The person who gains the most from the departure of those who occupied the building is, Yunier conjectures, the president of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) of the block where Factoría 70 is located. The Havana resident identifies him with the name of Santiago, owner of a hostel and a pink convertible car, with “a lot of power and money.”
Santiago, who offers tourists rooms in his mansion from the early 20th century, also provides tour services in his vehicle through Havana and other areas of the country. On his social networks, you can see a photograph taken in mid-January in which, in the background of his shiny convertible, stands the ruined façade of the still inhabited citadel, as evidenced by the sheets hanging on its balconies.
Yunier, citing a rumor circulating among neighbors, attributes Santiago to having enough influence over the government and the local police to accelerate the eviction. His objective: to have free way to expand an automobile workshop that he owns on the ground floor of the building. “It was he himself who put the materials to close the door of that building, cement, blocks, etc. Now he started saving other cars.”
Of the Factoría 70 property, formerly a stately three-story building, there are ocher walls stained by humidity
Other nearby residents also point to the desire to “calm the block” as one of the prosperous entrepreneur’s main motivations for pushing authorities to act. Although within the touristic Old Havana, the Jesús María neighborhood where the building is located, it does not enjoy the preference of travelers due to the poor state of its infrastructure, barely benefited by restorations, and its insecurity.
Of the Factoría 70 building, formerly a stately three-story building, there are ocher walls stained by humidity. Inside the ruin, families lived overcrowded and with frequent neighborhood tensions.
The rains of these days have hit the building, already abandoned, even more, and the only thing with any color in the area is the body of the convertible, an intense pink. Those who left Factoría 70 continue looking for a place to sleep, in a city that is increasingly harsh for newcomers as well as for natives. Yunier’s diagnosis is pessimistic. “In Havana there is nowhere to live. They don’t say anything. They don’t help anyone. Nobody gives you hope.”
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