“We saw that the crack that went from the roof to the balcony began to open more and the façade leaned forward,” say neighbors of the property at Consulado and Virtues Streets
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, June 28, 2024 – The collapse of part of a two-story building, located on the corner of Consulado and Virtudes streets in Centro Habana, has set off alarms among the residents of one of the Cuban capital’s neighborhoods most affected by the deterioration. In the area, which is very busy and densely populated, there are numerous tenements and houses on the verge of collapse.
“We saw that the crack that went from the roof to the balcony began to open more and the facade leaned forward,” said a neighbor who witnessed, from her window, the fall of the first fragments of the wall, speaking to 14ymedio by phone. The woman lives across the street, in the building where the Havana Musical Theater used to be, which has fallen into ruin and become a public trash dump since it closed in 1989.
The building, built around the 1920s and in a neoclassical style, has experienced a lack of general maintenance
Vehicle traffic is closed in the area, both on Virtudes and on Consulado Streets, but “there is no good signage so that people do not walk here and you can see people passing by the rubble that fell, that is very dangerous,” she laments. The neoclassical style property, built around the 1920s, has suffered a lack of general maintenance and successive changes.
In addition to wooden platforms — colloquially called barbacoas [barbecues] — built in the rooms to increase the horizontal space, wooden or brick partitions have been added to divide the rooms. “A few years ago, several balconies collapsed, there were serious leaks and in the same corne