Havana's crumbling tenements: Heavy rains expose urban decay

Several building disasters occurred in Havana one after another last week due to heavy rains. According to a statement from Havana's Meteorological Forecast Center, a powerful downpour hit the Cuban capital in less than three hours.

In Havana, tall, long-neglected residential buildings collapsed. One resident died, and several were injured. Opposition websites believe that the disasters are caused by years of neglect in maintenance, overcrowding of homes, and lack of sufficient funds for construction.

According to statements announced by the city administration, for several years now, at least a thousand apartments in the Cuban capital become uninhabitable each year due to the lack of necessary repairs, and very few new ones are built.

More and more streets in Cuba's capital, once rightly regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in the Caribbean and all of Latin America, now haunt with the skeletons of former tenements even in the representative downtown district of Vedado. The National Office of Statistics and Information admits in its official bulletins that part of the capital's population, namely over 600,000 people, occupy "not the best condition" apartments.

The situation is not easy to fix due to significant budget deficits. Some hope for improving housing conditions in Cuba is created by the increasing income from the foreign tourism sector. Money earned from tourists can be partly allocated to improving housing infrastructure.