HavanaJournal - Link to original article

Published: Mon January 05, 2009

AFP - Cubans will be permitted to build their own homes and do so using private funds, President Raul Castro announced on Sunday, in the latest reforms to back off the hardline communism of the past five decades.

Home construction in Cuba primarily has been left to the government, but demand has outstripped supply and a dire lack of housing has greatly frustrated the island’s 11 million inhabitants.

Raul Castro, 77 years old, who took over the reins of power from his older brother Fidel Castro last February, said the policy change would allow the quick construction of hundreds of thousands of new dwellings.

Cubans will be given clear guidelines about the dimensions of a proposed new dwelling, Castro explained on a local television program.

They will be told, “OK, here you can build. I’ve given you this amount of space, that amount of room for a street, and that amount for a sidewalk. Now build your little home with whatever you can,” the former defense minister said.

His remarks were made as he visited the newly built La Risuena neighborhood, a settlement of Venezuela-built homes erected with the help of oil money that has lessened, but not erased, the housing deficit.

The announcement comes just days after Cuba’s celebration of the 50-year anniversary of its 1959 revolution. Former leader Fidel Castro was a no-show at the celebrations.

Havana has succeeded in building only about half its annual goal of 100,000 new homes per year, and the dearth of dwellings worsened last year after Cuba was struck in succession by three hurricanes that leveled around a half million homes.

Over the past year, reforms initiated by the younger Castro brother have included putting vacant farmland in private hands, increasing farmers’ pay, and allowing private contractors such as taxi drivers back into Cuba’s transport sector.

Raul Castro also has allowed Cubans to buy computers, own mobile telephones, rent cars and spend nights in hotels previously accessible only to foreigners - provided they can afford such luxuries on the meager average pay, equivalent to about 17 dollars per month.

Publicado el lunes 05 de enero del 2009

Agence France Presse - enalce con artículo en El Nuevo Herald

El presidente cubano Raúl Castro ordenó este domingo que se autorice a la población a levantar sus casas a partir de sus esfuerzos y recursos, para enfrentar el gran déficit habitacional que vive la isla.

“No prohibir. Decirles, bueno aquí se puede construir, tiene tanto (de área), y deje este ancho para que por aquí pase una calle un día, y por ahí una acera, y que hagan su casita con lo que puedan”, dijo Castro, según un reporte del telediario local.

Raúl Castro, de 77 años, habló en Santiago de Cuba, 900 km al sudeste, donde visitó el nuevo barrio “La Risueña”, donde se levantaron 100 “petrocasas” (producidas con derivados de petróleo) fabricadas en Venezuela.

Cuba enfrenta una grave crisis habitacional, agudizada este año por tres poderosos huracanes que afectaron medio millón de viviendas y dejaron pérdidas por 10,000 millones de dólares. Según Raúl Castro el país tardará entre tres y seis años para recuperarse de estos daños.

La fabricación de casas en Cuba es un proceso fundamentalmente estatal. Sin embargo, el programa gubernamental aprobado hace tres años y medio para la construcción de 100,000 casas anuales no se ha cumplido, y se ha ido reajustando a casi la mitad.

“Aquí lo que hay que hacer es cientos de miles de casas, por eso quiero el árido y la fábrica de cemento y vamos a hacer de verdad la base industrial para desarrollar la vivienda. ¡Ya está bueno, vamos a hacerla de verdad!”, dijo Castro, que en febrero sustituyó definitivamente a su hermano enfermo Fidel en la presidencia.

By Linda Pressly 

BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents

Link to original article on BBC

Maria Julia is desperate. She lives in a Havana flat that belongs to her husband’s grandparents.

For the last seven years she and her husband have shared a bedroom with their two children.

Maria Julia - not her real name - fears her relationship with her husband will not withstand the pressures of their living arrangements for much longer.

She says she has only one chance of securing a separate flat in Havana for her family and saving her relationship - and it is drastic.

“The only option I have is to divorce my husband, and to marry a man who has legal title to a flat. I will pay him. Then in two years, he will sign over the property to me, we will get divorced and I will marry my husband again.”

This complicated transaction will cost Maria Julia $10,000 (£6,800). It is a fortune in Cuba, but the minimum going rate. Her sister has sent her the money from the US, and Maria Julia has it hidden - in cash - somewhere in Havana.

Maria Julia’s plan to buy a flat is illegal, which is why we cannot identify her. In Cuba, only the state has the right to sell property. Private buyers - or sellers - may end up having their home confiscated altogether by the state if they are caught.

Swap shop

There was already a shortfall of more than half a million homes before three hurricanes wrought widespread destruction in 2008.

Overall, the housing stock is in a dilapidated state.

The precariousness of the Cuban economy, which the government says is partly due to the impact of the US trade embargo, means the new building programme is not keeping up with demand. So the black market is thriving.

“It’s the biggest, really the biggest in Cuba,” says Juan Triana, an economist at the Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

Mr Triana is unwilling to guess at what the housing black market is worth in cash terms, but he is troubled.

“Everybody’s losing. And for me, as an economist, it’s frustrating. Today if you want to buy your home, you have to use the black market.”

Although Cubans are not allowed to buy and sell properties privately, they are permitted to swap. And on a Saturday morning, hundreds of people gather on the Paseo del Prado in central Havana in the hope of finding someone they can exchange homes with.

Officially no money should change hands. Yet in practice, swapping a smaller property for something larger will mean parting with several thousand dollars.

But Maria Julia has no property to swap - her husband’s grandparents hold the legal title to the flat she lives in. So a bogus marriage is the only way she can see of changing her circumstances.

Maria Julia has used an illicit middleman, known as a corredor - literally, a runner - to find her new home. She is busy working and has no time to do it herself. If the deal goes through, she will pay him $500.

Property chain

The transaction will take time, because the man she will buy from in Havana is still securing his own new property.

“He has a girlfriend in Santiago de Cuba,” she says. “They have seen somewhere in Santiago they want to buy. And his girlfriend is going to have to marry a very old man in his 80s to get that property.

“They will have to pay the old man too, with the money that I am going to give them. It is a really long chain.”

Cuba is marking the 50th anniversary of its revolution. One of the most popular moves of Fidel Castro in his early years of government was housing reform.

Many tenants got legal title to their homes and rents were capped.

Multiple property ownership was prohibited: Cubans can still only legally own one home in the town where they live and another in the countryside.

But 50 years on from those heady, optimistic beginnings, housing is close to the top of the list of complaints among Cubans.

Juan Marcos Mendez, the vice president of the government’s National Housing Institute, does not deny there are huge challenges. But he maintains that the answer does not lie in privatising housing.

“Housing is social property. We don’t believe it’s right for people to make a profit from it. Of course, some people still haven’t understood the reasons why we have these rules and they try to get ahead illegally.

“But it’s only possible to improve the situation by continuing our building programme - although the United States blockade has a serious impact on that. We may have problems in Cuba but we don’t have people sleeping under bridges.”

And that is true. But the impact of the housing shortage is distorting family life for many people.

Now Maria Julia is worried that the deal she has set in motion will further sour her relationship with her husband.

“It’s one thing to accept the fact you have to make a bogus marriage as an idea, but quite another to actually do it.

“I have a worry - maybe it’s a premonition - that I’ll solve the housing problem for me and my children, but my relationship with my husband won’t survive.”

You can hear Linda Pressly’s programme about the Cuban housing crisis on BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents on Monday, 29 December, 2008 at 2030 GMT. It will be repeated on 1 January, 2009 at 1230 GMT.