The new prototype joins the adaptation of containers in homes, ideas that the state media promote as “the most viable solutions” and “innovation.”
LIMA, Peru – The official press of the Cuban regime offered a recent look at the recovery in the province of Santiago de Cuba, one of the main provinces affected by the passage of Hurricane Melissa at the end of October.
On the matter, the state newspaper Granma assures that “an intense housing construction and rehabilitation program” is being carried out in the territory, highlighting among the details a “prototype of a house in which cement is not used”, already built in the Segundo Frente municipality.
In Santiago de Cuba alone, the last cyclone left serious damage to the housing stock, with more than 137,000 properties with some type of damage, an official figure in which 22,000 total collapses stand out.
Granma Danislay Hechavarría Duvalón, coordinator of Construction Programs and Objectives in the Provincial Government, described the construction of houses without cement and “the adaptation of premises and containers into homes” as “the most viable solutions.” In that same group, it included “the construction of hundreds of typology IV houses,” and “the restitution of the roofs in those that had such damages.”
In addition to the suitability of these projects in the face of future meteorological events, with these characteristics the Cuban regime is building homes in the San Luis and Julio Antonio Mella municipalities.
“They are attended to in the paperwork offices and in the respective points of sale of construction materials,” says the official.
Hechavarría Duvalón also assured that local production of construction materials is recovering, mainly aggregates, lime, clay and stone bricks, and clay connections.
“Other solutions are being evaluated in the most affected municipalities, Santiago de Cuba with around 67,000 homes, Palma Soriano and Contramaestre,” he added.
Castro’s “innovation” in the spotlight
The actions in the eastern province follow the line of another controversial news also published by Granma on the eve According to the newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, the Electromechanical Company of Villa Clarasubordinate to the Ministry of Construction, is carrying out a project to “manufacture 20 homes from the reuse of metal containers”, an initiative whose distribution – the note itself points out – “will be coordinated by the provincial government.”
The official publication presented the project as an alternative to “strengthen the housing fund” of the territory and assured that the entity “already has 90 percent of the necessary resources.” However, the text does not specify costs, delivery times, verifiable technical characteristics (thermal insulation, ventilation, air conditioning), or public allocation criteria for beneficiary families, despite being homes designed from metal modules.
While state media insist on the idea of “innovation” and “creative capacity,” the critical reaction on social networks focused on one basic point: the heat. On Facebook, journalist José Raúl Gallego he questioned that they try to house people in “metal boxes” and warned that, “in a country where temperatures constantly exceed 30 degrees, these containers without air conditioning are practically ovens where no one will be able to live.”
Gallego also described the project as “an example of the low capacity of those who run Cuba” and predicted that the measure “will only serve” to show results and divert resources: “to falsely increase the numbers of housing construction” and so that “shortly all those containers will be abandoned while the housing problem continues to increase,” he wrote.
