Havana was in midnight darkness and the floodwaters were neck high when Yanelis Rodríguez finally gave up hope that help was on its way.

As giant waves crashed over the Malecón seawall just 200m away, Rodríguez and her two young children waded through Hurricane Irma’s storm surge to safety.

“The winds started at four in the afternoon. We’d waited so long because we just assumed the government would come and help us,” she said. “We got out of the water and sheltered in a nearby building.”

It was a harrowing night: in the early hours of the morning an iron girder crashed down on to the roof above them. Yanelis ran into the street, before changing her mind and going back inside: it was too dangerous to seek refuge elsewhere.

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Irma hit Cuba as a category 5 hurricane and barrelled through the central and western provinces, causing catastrophic destruction in a country that prides itself on disaster preparedness. At least 10 people died – Cuba’s worse hurricane death toll since Hurricane Dennis killed 16 in 2005.

Seven of the fatalities were in Havana, whose decaying historic buildings were no match for the force of the storm. And as as uprooted trees were hauled away, and electricity returned to more neighbourhoods, many in the Cuban capital were asking whether authorities were ready for another storm.

Two brothers, Roydis and Walfrido Valdés, died instantly in their central Havana apartment when a huge block of concrete fell from four storeys above them.

The fire brigade arrived a few hours later to pull their bodies from the wreckage. But more than a dozen people remain living in the 100-year-old building. An elegant marble staircase with an ornate iron banister leads up to the first floor where the brothers died.

Cracks between bricks in the wall are many inches wide. The floor is sunk and uneven. Like many of Havana’s once-elegant buildings, it is home to dozens of families but has received little maintenance over the years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cubans wade through the rubble from a collapsed building in Havana. Many of the city’s historic structures have received little maintenance in over the years. Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images

“The government knows this building is liable to collapse,” said one neighbour, Lixa Peñalver, 47, adding that an elderly man fell to his death years ago when another part of the building caved through. “If you know that there’s a big risk, surely this should be one of the first buildings you evacuate. But nobody came.”

María Estela Pedroso, who knew the brothers, said she had been trying to convince the authorities to relocate her for over a decade. “Nobody should be living where we are living,” she shouted furiously. “I go to all the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution meetings, all the assemblies, and I’ve always said they are not going to get us out of here until somebody dies.”

Luís Dilu Galiente is the president of the building’s Committee for the Defence of the Revolution – neighbourhood bodies which provide basic social services, and also watch out for counter-revolutionary activities.

He admitted that the block had not been evacuated, but pointed out that many locals had taken in neighbours seeking shelter – a standard element of Cuba’s emergency planning. A family of six has been staying in Galiente’s own two-bedroom apartment since before Irma struck.

“The state didn’t send buses to evacuate the building like they have on other occasions. But anybody can find refuge if they want it – at least with their neighbours,” he said.



The government knows this building is liable to collapse. This should be one of the first buildings you evacuate Lixa Peñalver, Havana resident

Cuban media reported that tens of thousands of people were evacuated in Havana and over a million throughout the island. On Saturday, after the extent of the flooding became clear, dozens of buses were sent to evacuate people from central Havana, according to state media.



Though television ran regular updates warning of flooding and advising people to take precautions in the run up to the hurricane, the forecasts did not place Havana in the main storm path.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The flooded streets of Havana after Hurricane Irma passed through. At least 10 people have died in the storm. Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP

“Given that the country is so poor and the housing is so bad, you would think that there would be many more deaths,” said Elizabeth Newhouse, who has led delegations of emergency managers from New Orleans and the Gulf coast in the US to study Cuba’s response system. “This is really a small number given what it could be.”

“They are very adept in disaster mitigation,” said Newhouse, director of the Cuba program at the Center for International Policy. “They have to be.”

Three-quarters of the island’s workforce is still employed by the state, so although Cuba’s government is often slow, bureaucratic and profoundly inefficient, in times of crisis, it can marshal its human and material resources in a way that other islands in the Caribbean cannot.

The week before the storm hit, the island’s pharmaceutical industry was instructed to put other medicines on hold so as to manufacture and distribute hydration salts.

Tonnes of extra flour were distributed to state bakeries in the days before the hurricane struck. Authorities cut gas and electricity before storm hit, but bakers in Havana’s Vedado district worked through the night, using a petrol generator and sometimes even firewood to keep production going.

With macabre comic timing, Donald Trump renewed the US embargo on Cuba for another year just hours before the Irma made landfall. While the island’s faltering economy goes some way to explaining the condition of housing stock the embargo makes matters worse.



Havana: one of the world's great cities on the brink of a fraught transition Read more

As city authorities go about patching up walls and constructing new homes, Cuba will have to pay over the odds for building materials. The country cannot buy from multinationals that trade with the US, so is forced to source items from further afield.

With dozens of hotels smashed, millions still without power, and thousands of hectares of sugar cane destroyed, financing the reconstruction effort will be a challenge: the embargo also prevents Cuba from joining the IMF and the World Bank, as well as other regional lending institutions that grant infrastructure loans.

Nobody that the Guardian spoke to in central Havana could point to a nearby shelter, but elsewhere in the city there were plenty to be found.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People put furniture out to dry outside their homes in Havana. Photograph: Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

The Belén Convent in old Havana is a care home for the elderly which has been transformed into a shelter for the hurricane. It is clean and calm. Fans whirl to keep the heat at bay. The bunks have clean sheets, and apart from mothers sleeping with new-borns, everyone has their own bed.



The smell of fresh coffee wafts through the air as a nurse chats to a police officer as half a dozen evacuees sit back to watch a Bruce Lee movie.



“When the rain started I came here with my daughter. We knocked on the door and they let us in,” said Carlotta Francisca Valdés, 79.



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“The food here is pretty good. I’ve been given things that I don’t have in my house at the moment: minced beef, for example.”

Yorka Gutiérrez Pérez came here with her neighbours when the front of their building collapsed. She’s hoping to stay in the shelter until she’s given a new house, but given that hundreds of Cubans are in temporary housing following the last hurricane, it’s likely she’ll have a wait.

“I’ve got faith in this government,” she said. “Until now, at least, the Revolution has never abandoned us”.

Additional reporting by Amanda Holpuch in New York



