DEVELOPMENT-CUBA: Keeping a Roof over the People of Havana

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Sep 24 2001 (IPS) - The Cuban capital, home to 20 percent of the country’s 11 million inhabitants, is suffering a severe deterioration in its housing sector and government plans do not go far enough toward resolving the problem, agree experts.

A recent study shows that by 1999 just 57 percent of the 575,795 existing housing units in Havana were in “good” condition, with the remaining 43 percent being in “inferior” or “poor” state.

“In some municipalities the scenario is quite complicated,” pointed out economist Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, in his study “City of Havana: Economic Performance and Social Situation.”

The report, published by the Centre for Cuban Economic Studies and the Cuban Office of the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation, found that a full 75 percent of the housing located in Old Havana were categorised as poor or inferior.

It also indicated that in 1999 in Havana there were 7,143 ‘ciudadelas’, buildings with several small and independent interior rooms that give onto a common courtyard or patio, 38 percent of which were concentrated in Old Havana and in the city’s central district. Most of these are run down.

“My building was declared uninhabitable, but we continue to live there because we have nowhere else to go,” says María Martínez, resident of a sector of Old Havana that has not yet been targeted by government reconstruction programmes.

Expert Pérez Villanueva states that 11.3 percent of the structures built last year on this Caribbean island were constructed in Havana, home to 2.2 million people.

Official reports show that the average pace of construction is 40,000 new housing units annually, while conservation and reconstruction efforts involve another 300,000 households each year.

But despite these efforts, “the scarcity of material and of financing” means that the numbers are not high enough to cover the demand, admitted Mario Cabello, president of the National Housing Institute, in an interview with the state-run press.

In that respect, data from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) indicate that housing construction by the Cuban population represented 40 percent of total housing construction in 1999, compared to just 17 percent in 1989.

But more than 90 percent of housing construction in Havana is in the hands of the state, while in the rest of the country 55 percent is conducted by cooperatives or individuals.

Martínez stressed that in her case it has been impossible to obtain the materials necessary to repair her house. “I don’t have the dollars to go to the currency exchange stores where you can find just about anything,” she complained.

The Fidel Castro government in the mid-1990s set up a network of dollar stores after it authorised the free circulation of the US currency on this socialist-governed island.

There are also work sites that supply construction materials to their employees, who may also turn to government-run sites that sell material at cost, though for Cuban pesos, not dollars.

The other option for obtaining building materials is the black market, which is fed mostly by goods stolen from large suppliers and, say experts, represents a severe case of high demand and low supply.

“Evidently there is a quantity of materials coming from different legal or illegal sources, which are also used in these works, the origins of which are still not clear,” acknowledged housing official Cabello.

The Cuban authorities last year made changes to Cuba’s General Law on Housing, making the legal process more strict as far as construction, remodelling or expansion of a housing unit “by one’s own efforts.”

The new measures are an attempt to halt a boom in realty swaps, the only private sector activity legally allowed, given that buying and selling real estate is prohibited.

There arose “a critical situation with these exchanges and the major chains, where as many 20 houses were involved and there was always an illicit sale of two or three,” commented María del Olvido Vales, assistant legal director of housing for the Havana city government.

The impact of the modified law, officially described as a “blow against profit,” made itself felt last year with more than 1,400 confiscations of “ill-gotten” housing units, 548 expulsions of illegal occupants and fines totalling more than 1.5 million dollars.

This year, 21 luxurious homes in the Havana neighbourhood of Santa Fe, many of which belonged to foreigners, were also expropriated under the new legislation and handed over to the state to be put to social use.

“Behind the construction of this majestic real estate, or their illegal purchase or sale, there are generally large sums of money being moved. It is there that we find the most corrupt and degrading actions related to housing,” stated a Castro government official.