The property seems abandoned, but more than a dozen families live inside.
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 19 June 2024 — At noon this Wednesday, a yellow tape blocked the passage to the entry of the building at 425 Monte Street, between Ángeles and Águila, in Old Havana, where last night a partial collapse left a young woman injured. The adjacent property at number 423 had claimed the life of a man three years ago, when one of its side walls collapsed.
“We can’t even sleep here, all of us who live on this piece of street are in danger,” a neighbor who went to the place to get information about the injured woman tells 14ymedio. “We don’t know anything; we have called the Emergency Hospital [General Freyre Andrade], but they say that they don’t treat patients in Old Havana and they don’t have a trauma ward either.”
This newspaper’s attempts to know the state of the young woman, through the information numbers of the Calixto García Clinical Surgical Hospital, were also unsuccessful. A video of the moment she was evacuated shows the woman passed out and being put into a police patrol in the absence of an ambulance for her transfer. This Wednesday, among the neighbors, her situation was still a question mark.
“It’s been raining for many days and tragedy could be smelled in the air”
With the door closed, the facade in a calamitous state and the roof of the entrance propped up with thick wooden beams, the building where the collapse occurred seems abandoned, but inside there are still more than a dozen families crammed into small apartments. For years, the residents have feared that a wall or one of the middle floors will collapse. This Tuesday, part of the nightmare became a reality.
“It’s been raining for many days and tragedy could be smelled in the air,” said an old
