CUBA: Housing Shortage, Strict Regulations Create Straitjacket

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Apr 8 2003 (IPS) - Cuba’s severe housing shortage – a cause of divorces, marriages of convenience and serious family conflicts – leads many couples to indefinitely postpone the dream of a home of their own and forces growing families to live in crowded conditions.

According to official statistics, around 85 percent of homes in Cuba belong to those who live in them. However, ownership does not give Cubans the right to purchase and sell real estate, which is a state monopoly in this socialist Caribbean island nation.

”I can’t sell this apartment in which we no longer fit, or buy another one with more rooms,” complained Mariela Campos, a 40- year-old teacher. ”Nor can I swap it for a bigger one, and in order to expand our home we would have to buy the building materials at the price of gold” in the government shops that only accept dollars.

Campos and her husband own their home thanks to the General Housing Law of 1985, which transferred ownership of residential real estate property from the state to the people who actually live there.

But she noted that the regulations adopted in the past few years have made it impossible to improve her family’s cramped housing situation.

”I live in a small apartment with my husband and three kids, and we wanted to move to another apartment or house with one more bedroom,” she told IPS. ”But when I went to apply, they told me that since last year, that is no longer possible.”

Campos explained that officials at the National Institute of Housing, which administers and regulates every aspect of the sector, told her that people can only ”swap” or exchange their home for a dwelling with the same number of square metres.

”If you are moving to a larger home, that implies that you are paying something in monetary terms, which is illegal, so I can’t do anything about our situation,” she added.

Local authorities describe Cuba’s housing legislation as ”noble and altruistic,” because the state subsidises 50 percent of the value of housing units, which people pay off over the space of 20 years at a maximum interest rate of three percent.

But many people are frustrated, and their grievances focus on the decrees and provisions that regulate the construction, remodeling or expansion of housing.

Local laws establish that the limited private enterprise activities authorised by the government since the mid-1990s do not include the building of sumptuous dwellings to turn a profit.

One of the aims of the measures adopted in recent years was to curb a growing business in housing swaps, which had become a channel – the only one – for private enterprise in the housing sector, due to the ban on buying-and-selling of real estate.

According to local authorities, it had reached the point where up to 20 housing units were being swapped in one long ”chain” transaction used to conceal the illegal sales of two or three dwellings.

The current legislation stipulates that no more than three similarly-sized units can be involved in any single swap.

In 2000 alone, authorities confiscated 1,400 ”ill-gotten” dwellings, carried out 548 evictions of ”illegal occupants”, and levied fines for a total of more than 1.5 million dollars for infractions of housing sector laws and regulations.

This year, a still unpublished number of dwellings have been confiscated under Decree-Law 232, which cracks down on drug- related activity, corruption or other offences, and provides for the confiscation of homes or locales where illicit drugs are produced, trafficked, acquired, stored, consumed or hidden.

”Anyone who commits a crime should be punished as established by the penal code,” said Campos. ”But the confiscation of a home can leave an entire family, who were not necessarily involved (in the illegal activity), in the street.”

Decree-Law 232 states that it is unacceptable for ”unscrupulous individuals to take advantage” of the ”achievements of the revolution…for profit-making activities and personal enrichment.”

In Havana, acquiring a room of one’s own through the swapping mechanism generally costs between 4,000 and 5,000 dollars, according to the dwelling’s location and condition.

The costly and illegal arrangement is often considered crucial to a growing family or a young couple in need of privacy.

The shortage of housing is frequently a cause of divorce, as couples are forced to live with their parents or parents-in-law, with the resulting tension.

”In this kind of business deal, it is not only money that is needed,” said a lawyer who is well-versed in housing questions. ”Sometimes you have to come up with formulas for taking advantage of legal loopholes, like divorces or marriages of convenience.”

The need for housing can be so desperate that some couples actually divorce in order for one of the spouses to marry someone who owns a house or apartment that they are interested in selling. The ”fictitious marriage” then ends in divorce, and in the division of assets, the dwelling goes to the person who wanted to buy it, who proceeds to remarry their original spouse.

In addition, marriages of convenience are common, with people choosing to marry merely because the prospective husband or wife has a home of their own.

Economists say the housing shortage is the most pressing social problem in Cuba today.

Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) statistics show that an average of 35,000 housing units a year were built in Cuba between 1986 and 1999, peaking at 40,000 in 1987.

However, that was not sufficient to keep up with demand, the regional United Nations agency stated in a broad study on the Cuban economy carried out in the 1990s.

Reports indicate that the greatest housing deficit is seen in Havana, a city of 2.2 million, where 46 percent of a total of 556,000 dwellings are in fair to bad condition.

There is hope that the Census on Population and Housing carried out last September, the results of which are due in July, will shed light on the true magnitude of the problem.

The census should provide up-to-date information on the number of available housing units, as well as their characteristics.

The previous census, which dates back to 1981, showed that Cuba had a total of 2.29 million homes for a population of 9.72 million (which has since grown to 11.2 million).

According to ECLAC estimates, Latin America as a whole had a shortage of 20 million housing units in the early 1990s, and between 2.3 and 3.2 million units a year would have to be built simply to prevent the deficit from growing.