After washing her dirty clothes, and under the strong Cuban afternoon sun, Iverlysse Junco climbed to the roof of her three-story building, a former H. Hupman cigar factory, where dozens of cigar rollers shaped the cigars of another era. From her roof, she can see the 91.7-meter-high dome of the Capitol; the facilities of the Saratoga Hotel, which burned down two years ago; the lavish Gran Teatro de La Habana, and some street vendors, taxi drivers, neighbors and tourists who parade now that the rain has stopped, the sun has come out, and the city is beginning to dry out.
This is the worst. Not so much the rain, but the calm that comes when it stops raining. This is the time when the sun dries out the old buildings in Havana, which crack, deteriorate, and in the worst cases, turn to dust after the roar of a collapse. Last Saturday, 56 millimeters of rain fell on Havana in just three hours, according to a report by the Meteorological Institute’s Forecast Center. After several days under torrential rain, several streets in the municipalities of Centro Habana, Cerro, Diez de Octubre, San Miguel del Padrón and Plaza de la Revolución were flooded, and some 20 collapses were recorded in the capital, leaving at least one dead and several injured.
On her rooftop, Iverlysse Junco is careful when she approaches one of the side walls, lest she suddenly falls down. “This building is, as we Cubans say, an old woman with blush,” she says. In addition to the Capitol, the Saratoga and the Gran Teatro, the building where Iverlysse lives is surrounded by many structures overgrown with weeds, skeletons of buildings, places that years ago were someone’s home and that today remain abandoned, between silence and rubble. Iverlysse says that it is normal to hear the sound of fire truck sirens in the neighborhood when a balcony falls, a wall falls off, or one of these constructions collapses in her neighborhood. These are not isolated cases: the government has recognized that in Havana about 1,000 homes collapse every year.
The building where Iverlysse lives — located at number 409 on Amistad Street, between Barcelona and Dragones, which was once a tobacco factory, a school and now a housing site for 48 families who were victims of other collapses or who were homeless — has leaks, lost the roof on one of its sides, and some floors fill with water when it rains. Even so, authorities assure that there is no danger.
Iverlysse, 39, was born in a citadel or a residential complex where about 20 families lived. All her life she has gone from one shelter to another, from one transit house to another, places that are almost uninhabitable, without water, without gas, even without bathrooms. She says she has been defecating in buckets of water for 13 years. First alone, then with her five children. The government has not guaranteed them a better place to live. Now, in the midst of the latest blackout that left the building in darkness, Iverlysse’s refrigerator broke, and it will probably take years to replace it. “These people have already tired me,” she says. And when she says people, she means government.
Hotels for housing
On January 27, 2020, an incident shook all of Havana: three girls lost their lives after the balcony of a house fell on their bodies in the Jesús María neighborhood, in the municipality of Old Havana. The government then cleared itself of blame and accused the neighbors of homicide, sentencing them to up to seven years in prison.
Tragedies of this kind are reported every year. Several lives have been claimed by landslides in Havana, especially in the area of Old Havana, a site that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982 for its exquisite colonial architecture. The housing shortage in Cuba has been one of the many unsolved problems since the Revolution came to power. Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago recently told EL PAÍS that in the past indicators placed Cuba among the first places in terms of equality, health, pensions, but “never in housing.” It is normal to see several generations living in the same space in Cuba, entire families destined to live in shelters, or the proliferation of the so-called “arrive and put” on the outskirts of the city, the type of makeshift houses that many people build for lack of a home.
When the weather forecast announces rain in Havana, Yuly Sáez doesn’t sleep a wink. “I can’t sleep because I’m so nervous,” she says. “I spend my time staring at the ceiling. I pray to God that nothing bad happens.”
Since 2006, Yuly’s building has been in danger of collapse. It is a building from 1903, a building with tall columns and a dome that has deteriorated and lost its former majesty. At number 409 on 11th Street in Vedado, one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in Havana, Yuly lives with five people, who have to move the beds around because of the leaks that fall inside the house, and place buckets and basins that fill up as long as it rains.
Yuly is 39 years old and has lived in the same place for 37 years, the building that has been converted into a vacant lot and whose inhabitants have been requesting repairs since 1988. Now the deterioration is imminent. Yuly keeps the number of letters, complaints, requests and documents of all kinds that she has sent to the municipal and provincial authorities or to the National Assembly of People’s Power, who, although they hear her complaints, have never been willing to solve her problem. The walls swell from the humidity of the downpours. A root from a poplar tree went through the window of Yuly’s bedroom, and the dome of the building could collapse at any moment.
On days when she can’t take it anymore and her blood pressure is high, Yuly makes herself a cup of tea. She knows that a collapse is a possibility. “It’s very sad to be left without a roof, even if it’s bad, it’s yours.”
The National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) says that in Havana there are more than 600,000 people without housing in optimal conditions. Although the greatest housing deficit is reported in the capital, cities such as Holguín, Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey are also affected by this situation. Last year, the Minister of Construction, René Mesa Villafaña, said on National Television that some 853,000 homes in Cuba are in regular or poor condition. The authorities insist that the deterioration of the housing stock is a consequence of “climatic events, small-scale rehabilitation and conservation and non-compliance with the Housing Program.”
This month, the government acknowledged that, by the end of May, only 0.8% of the 447,375 homes needed to alleviate the situation had been built, or only 3,579 homes in the first five months of the year. The country, according to official data, needs to build around 20% more homes to alleviate this deficit. However, and this is something that many criticize, the money has been allocated to prioritize the construction of tourist facilities and not housing for Cubans. Data from the ONEI show that in 2022 some 195 million dollars were invested in services related to the tourism sector, including the construction of hotels, when only 8.5 million dollars were used in housing construction.
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