14ymedio, Pedro Espinosa, Havana, March 23, 2024 — The only natural light that residents enjoy in the tenements [“citadel” in Spanish] at Galiano and Virtudes in Havana comes from the vents at street level. However, those same openings allowed the penetration of the water that flooded the basement under an abandoned pharmacy, where several families with children live.
Storms like those that hit the west of the Island this weekend are fatal for a natural environment that is strained and in which people live in deplorable conditions. The vents lead onto the street, but also to several garbage containers the stench of which gets worse with the rain.
This Saturday, after the downpour, which also brought hail to several municipalities in Havana, residents removed water from their homes with buckets. Desperate, they asked the State for a suction pump to draw out the water, which is more than three feet deep.
The pharmacy above the tenements has been closed for ten years, but the residents say that is no reason to relocate them: “There is no danger of collapse,” they have been told, despite the fact that the bricks of the pharmacy’s facade barely support the building’s arches.
One of the side effects of the storm has been, precisely, the collapses of weak and abandoned structures such as the one that, in the Matanzas neighborhood of Pueblo Nuevo, collapsed this Friday. The building, located on San Juan de Dios Street, fell with a big “rumble” at 10:00 pm, according to what the neighbors told the official press. Many said that they had tired of warning the authorities about the danger. “What they warned about finally happened,” said one of the interviewees.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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