A Home in Havana: Housing Cuba’s Workers Today

• In Event: Homes for Havana's Workers in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Havana, this paper takes a historically-deep approach to compare the dissimilar opportunities available to distinct generations of everyday Cubans in access to housing in Havana.

I will chart the changes in the structure of opportunities in three different historical moments: after the 1959 Revolution, after the 1990s Special Period Crisis, and in the city today, after the November 2011 legalization of housing sales between private individuals and in the context of unstable relations between the US and Cuba.

I will describe the formal and informal systems of housing sales, rentals and loans in Havana through which “working-class” people, both those born in the city, and internal immigrants from other parts of Cuba, may access housing today.

I will also outline some of the challenges that working-class households in need of housing often face in their struggle to secure a dignified housing in the city they call home.

Author

• Hope E Bastián Martínez, Consorcio CASA La Habana