Cuba hotel explosion badly damaged major Baptist church
Alejandro Clemente González talked with an electrician while preparing for weekend services at Cuba’s most crucial Baptist church. An enormous explosion shook the building and shattered the 19th-century dome towering far above the pews.
Concrete plunged from walls, and wood and glass showered down from the windows as an apparent gas explosion next door killed at least 43 people in and around the devastated Hotel Saratoga in Old Havana on May 6.
“I didn’t know what was happening,” the church administrator said with a trembling voice as he revisited the sanctuary with Associated Press journalists on Wednesday. “I called on the Lord, ‘What is this, Lord? Help us!’”
He said the two men heard the cries of a receptionist as debris tumbled down around them, obstructing their path.
“I remembered an exit at the back, and then the brothers on the third floor came down, we all met, we counted one another,” and managed to escape. All 18 people who had been inside been physically unharmed, if shaken.
“Since then, I have slept badly. I jump at every sound,” González said.
Parts of the upper floors have collapsed at the building that houses Calvary Baptist Church and a seminary, and the denomination’s headquarters for western Cuba.
Sunlight glows through cracks in the outer walls; windows are shattered, their frames torn from the walls. The halls and rooms of the broken hotel are visible through a gap. A thick layer of grey dust covers the dark wood pews where hundreds meet for worship services.
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