This story is being updated
The Cuban government said at least 31 people were killed, including four children, and 50 injured in a powerful explosion that tore apart three floors of a luxury hotel in Havana's historic district Friday morning.
The Cuban news agency ACN published photos showing severe damage to the Hotel Saratoga in the Cuba capital and clouds of dust billowing into the sky.
The semiofficial website Cubadebate reported that nearby clinics were treating people who had been injured and that several ambulances had gone to the scene. It said a school next door had been evacuated.
The hotel is located in Old Havana, one of the city's most popular tourist districts. No guests were staying at the 96-room Hotel Saratoga because it was undergoing renovations, Havana Gov. Reinaldo García Zapata told the Communist Party newspaper Granma. But the Spanish government said one Spanish tourist was killed and another injured.
“It has not been a bomb or an attack. It is a tragic accident,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who visited the site, said in a tweet. Officials told WLRN at the scene that preliminary investigation indicated the explosion was caused by a kitchen gas leak inside the hotel, possibly as a truck was delivering gas to the hotel.
The blast happened as Cuba is struggling to revive its key tourism sector that was devastated by the coronavirus pandemic.
Cuba’s national health minister, José Ángel Portal, told The Associated Press that hospitals had received about 40 injured people, but estimated that the number could rise as the search continues for people who may be trapped between the debris of the 19th century structure in the Old Havana neighborhood of the city.
Officials told WLRN's Catalina Garcia, who was near the scene, that at least 13 people are unaccounted for. Nearby, some 60 displaced tenants of neighboring residential buildings waited to be evacuated because the blast may have rendered their homes unsafe.
The five-star, 96-room hotel in Old Havana has two bars, two restaurants and a rooftop pool, according to its website.
Photos showed much of the hotel’s outer wall blown away, exposing interior rooms, with clouds of dust billowing into the sky.
Police cordoned off the area as firefighters and ambulance crews worked inside.
Photographer Michel Figueroa said he had been walking past the hotel when “the explosion threw me to the ground, and my head still hurts.... Everything was very fast.”
Yazira de la Caridad, mother of two, said the explosion shook her home a block from the hotel: “The whole building moved. I thought it was an earthquake,” she said. “I’ve still got my heart in my hand.”
Mayiee Pérez said she had rushed to the scene after receiving a call from her husband, Daniel Serra, who works at a foreign exchange shop inside the hotel. She said he told her, “I am fine, I am fine. They got us out,” but had been unable to reach him since.
(Video courtesy of Catalina Garcia)
As a caravan of rescue brigade and rubble removal trucks poured into the area Friday afternoon, nearby residents spoke of saving victims from the destruction immediately after the blast.
"I ran out of my building and just started trying to pul people out of the rubble," one resident, Adriana Salazar, still in his bloodstained T-shirt, told WLRN.
"But some were already dead when I got to them."
with reporting by the Associated Press
