HABITAT-CUBA: Acute Housing Shortage in Havana

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jun 19 1998 (IPS) - Cubans wanting the urban life in Havana have found it almost impossible to obtain accomodation of any kind in the capital and many are returning to the countryside.

“Havana is Cuba and everything else is the landscape,” is an old saying saying in this country but there is another line from from a popular song that goes: “Havana can’t take any more.” With the city groaning at the seams populationwise, small wonder then that last year, there was actually a drop in the number of people living here.

Havana, which occupies less than one percent of the national territory, has about 20 percent of the Cuban population – about 2.2 million people.

Provincial government sources said that between April 1997 and April this year, some 22,000 people arrived in Havana and another 27,000 left – the first time for eight years there had been a negative trend in migratory rates to the city.

The decline is a result of decree 217 of the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers, which in April of last year established new regulations on migrating to Havana.

A 1996 National Migration Survey – funded by the United Nations Population Fund – showed that many emigres to the city experienced “downward mobility.”

Blanca Morejon, an expert at the Center for Demographic Studies at the University of Havana, said that a large portion of the people who oame here suffer an “impoverishment or decline in their work situation” once they “leave their jobs in their places of origin.”

The number of street vendors in the Cuban capital has increased greatly this decade. They linger at the entrances to stores selling a variety of merchandise which, in many cases, turns out to have been stolen from government-run stores.

Local authorities say that the immigrants exacerbate the city’s already serious problems of housing shortages and overloaded utilities, such as sewage, potable water, electricity, transportation and domestic fuel.

Many newly arrived immigrants settle in with family members, often creating serious problems of overcrowding. Others – particularly younger people – settle into buildings that have been declared uninhabitable, or movie theaters, stores or hotels that have been shut down.

According to the new regulations, in order to live in Havana one has to have authorization from the owner of the house where she rr he wants to establish residence, and demonstrate that there are at least 10 square meters for each person living in the house.

The weekly magazine Tribuna de La Habana revealed that, during the course of one year, more than 200,000 people applied for a new identification card to legalize their change of address.

Official reports to do indicate how many of the 27,000 people that left the capital last year did so voluntarily, or as a result of the application of the new law.

According to official figures, during the 1950s, the annual rate of migration to the was between 20,000 and 25,000 people. In 1959, when president Fidel Castro came to power, that number increased to 43,000.

Between 1965 and 1990, Cuba managed to regulate the migratory flow towards the capital to about 10,000 people a year, as a result of a policy aimed at achieving balanced development in all the country’s regions, and by eliminating the more marked differences between the city and the countryside.

But the alarm bells began to ring again in the mid-1990s, when the net internal migration rate for the capital went from 13,000 in 1990, to 17,000 in 1994, and reached more than 28,000 in 1996.