Crews work through 2nd night after Cuba hotel blast

Crews worked through a second night searching for victims of a hotel explosion that killed at least 27 people in Cuba’s capital and left more than a dozen missing amid the rubble.

The Hotel Saratoga, a luxury 96-room hotel in Old Havana, was finishing renovations when an apparent gas leak produced a massive explosion on Friday.

Just steps from Cuba’s capitol, the Saratoga’s façade was sheared off, burying workers inside and apparently passersby outside under concrete and twisted metal. The explosion came in the late morning when the streets and plaza in front of the stately hotel would have been full of pedestrians.

On Saturday evening, Dr. Julio Guerra Izquierdo, chief of hospital services at the Ministry of Health, raised the death toll to 27 with 81 people injured. The dead included four children and a pregnant woman. Spain’s President Pedro Sánchez said via Twitter that a Spanish tourist was among the dead and that another Spaniard was seriously injured.