A woman and a 15-year-old girl were taken to the hospital known as La Benéfica, neighbors told ’14ymedio’.
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 16 March 2025 — At least two people were injured Saturday night when an apartment building collapsed, at number 552 on Diez de Octubre Avenue, near the corner of Santa Irene Street, in Havana. During a visit to the site Sunday morning, several neighbors told 14ymedio that the injured were an adult woman and a 15-year-old girl.
According to testimony from some of the neighborhood’s residents, the victims were taken to Dr. Miguel Enríquez Hospital, known as La Benéfica. Some also told this newspaper that they were one of the families who had occupied the building, which was abandoned due to its deterioration, although 14ymedio was unable to corroborate this information.
Several images of the incident, which occurred inside the building during a national blackout, were shared on social media. The videos show the presence of a fire truck, an ambulance, police officers, and several paramedics transporting one of the injured women on a stretcher.
This morning, the street’s residents were gathered around a woman who was chatting with them, holding a list. A plainclothes political police officer on a motorcycle watched closely, registering the victims and their losses and promising some assistance or temporary shelter.
The presence of authorities didn’t stop the criticism from those who lived in the neighborhood and observed the scene from afar. “You can’t even go out [to the street to protest] because there’s so much repression. They put in place that law that says you can’t even criticize this on social media. And that collapse, the roof falling on you in the middle of the blackout…” lamented another neighbor.
In addition to the building’s situation, residents are focusing on obtaining ice to preserve food and water to consume while the power outage lasts.
In a video shared on social media by residents of the building, several people are seen gathered around the fire truck, which, along with the vehicles passing by on the street, provided the only light in the area.
At the improvised dump in front of the building, a ’diver’ was searching for trash buried beneath the debris that had fallen from the building.
Building collapses in Havana are a reality Cubans have had to get used to. Especially in older neighborhoods, the fear of a roof collapsing or a facade beginning to peel off is heightened if there’s a storm or a hurricane is approaching.
The collapses in Havana are a reality that Cubans have had to get used to.
In mid-February, a building located on San Bernardino Street, between Durege and General Serrano, in the Santos Suárez neighborhood of Diez de Octubre, collapsed, leaving a dozen families homeless.
Residents piled the few belongings they had managed to extract from the fragments of the wall on the side of the street while several state employees used a crane to demolish the three-story tenement. The building had been declared uninhabitable, according to residents, but with nowhere else to go, many families continued to live there.
At the end of June 2024, when Havana experienced several days of storms, at least 19 buildings suffered partial or total collapses, according to this newspaper’s information.
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