The outcome: A six-year-old boy with minor injuries
14ymedio, Havana, 28 May 2024 — Debris piled up this morning at number 57 Malecón, between Cárcel and Ángeles, in Central Havana. Hours earlier, a set of stairs had collapsed in the building, leaving a six-year-old boy with minor injuries. According to neighbours, the child has been transferred to the Juan Manuel Márquez hospital and appears to be out of danger.
A whirl of officials from the Communist Party and the provincial government chatted with residents in the area on Tuesday, while Comunales workers [public services, including garbage collection] collected the remains and shored up the building; nobody seemed to be moving out of the building. The situation invites us to think the residents should remain in a building whose decrepitude is in plain sight.
The event is unfortunately common in a country where housing construction is another of the many sectors fading away, as the report published by the National Statistics and Information Office (Onei) last week shows. On the island, the need to renovate the housing stock coexists with empty buildings due to mass emigration. Havana is the province that best reflects that schizophrenia: in five years it has gone from building 10,280 properties in 2019 to just 1,394 in 2023, according to data from the Construction Ministry.
The document also reveals other data, such as the heavy weight of private construction in the total and the falling supply of almost all the necessary materials in the last year.
According to the document, 16,065 homes were built in 2023, compared to 20,232 the previous year, 20.5% fewer. Of these, most were built by their owners by hiring specialists, 61.4% (9,869), while state companies took over 38.6% (6,205), a drop not only in their amount but also in their percentage compared to 2022 when they built 40.1% (8,103).
In 2023, 16,065 homes were built, compared to 20,232 the previous year, 20.5%