A 90-year-old Havana theater collapsed and killed one man in the fifth such wreck in 10 days, underscoring the precarious state of many dwellings and commercial structures in a city known for its rich architecture.

The Campoamor Theater was opened in 1921, closed in the mid 1970s and partially collapsed about five years ago, neighbors said. But four families, driven by Cuba’s critical housing shortage, were squatting there when it collapsed Thursday.

The four-story shell was featured in a 2006 documentary about the battered state of many of Havana’s old buildings, “The New Art of Making Ruins,” by German filmmakers Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler.

Ricardo Riquene Anaya, 47, plunged from the third floor and died when the building collapsed, one emergency worker told El Nuevo Herald. His son had to be pulled from the ruins but was reported in good condition, suffering from cuts and bruises.

Riquene was the custodian of a parking lot next to the Campoamor, one block from the National Capitol Building in the Centro Havana district and worked in a nearby car repair shop, according to a neighbor, Norley QuitutisCQ.

At least four youths were killed and five were injured when their three-story building, also in Centro Havana and also condemned after a partial collapse more than 10 years ago, fell in a heap just last week.

Three other Havana buildings collapsed Thursday without injuries, the emergency worker reported. He asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to comment and feared government sanctions.

Dissident Martha Beatriz Roque said she was told that some of the walls of the Campoamor Theater had been propped up with lumber, but thieves would make off with the timber under cover of night because of the shortage of construction materials.

“What we’re seeing is a sign of what is happening to the government, slowly crumbling,” she told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Havana.

Roque, spokesperson for a group of beginner journalists that calls itself the Cuban Network of Community Communicators, said the network recently published a report noting that 80 percent of the 178 theaters in Havana were in very bad shape.

Official government figures show the island of 11.2 million people has a shortage of about 600,000 housing units. Almost nine out of every 10 existing buildings need repairs, and more than 50 percent are ranked as being in “bad” state or worse.

Six persons were injured in 2009 with the collapse of a sports facility in the city of Matanzas, the Ateneo Deportivo Aurelio Janet.

Campoamor was inaugurated in 1921 and was the site of many performances by famous Cuban and foreign artists. It later was turned into a movie3 house, and in the 1970s it became a warehouse for theatrical equipment.

Writer Ramón Diaz Marzo, in a column posted Aug. 30 in the blog Cuba Verdad — Cuba Truth —complained that the government was not keeping up with the decay of many Havana buildings like the Campoamor.

He argued that while it takes workers in Hong Kong two years to build a 25-story skyscraper, the overhaul of Havana’s Hotel Capri was then on its second year.

Diaz Marzo also complained the government had abandoned the Campoamor, and recalled that as a child he took along a coat when he went to the movies there because the air conditioning was so cold.

The Campoamor, he wrote, “was a symbol of the Havana nightlife from the time when ‘Cuba smiled.”