Havana Cuba. — On November 3, 2011, the dictator Raúl Castro authorized, as part of the “reforms to update the economic model”the purchase and sale of houses between individuals, regulated by a series of regulations that entered into force on the 10th of the same month and that also recognized the right to donate, exchange or award houses for Cuban natural persons with a fixed address in the country and permanent resident foreigners.
The objective of the measure was to eliminate prohibitions and streamline procedures for the transfer of home ownership, one of the most serious problems faced by Cubans for decades, due to the insufficiency and poor state of the housing fund.
According to the new legislation, you could only own a home as a permanent residence, and another in a rest or summer area. A tax for both parties was also included in the process, determined by a series of characteristics that value the home based on its location, interior spatial distribution and construction quality.
Beyond what it represented in terms of the recognition of a right that Fidel Castro stole from Cubans in January 1959, the sale of homes has functioned as a way to obtain income in hard currency, given the unstoppable depreciation of the Cuban peso. In the last three years, with the dollarization of the economy after the opening of stores in freely convertible currency (MLC) and the worsening of the economic crisis, thousands of Cubans have chosen to sell their houses in dollars with the aim of emigrating or insuring foreign exchange savings.
These “agreements” occur in the zone of tolerance that the regime maintains to prevent social pressure from blowing up the fragile political stability of an impoverished nation. The law approved by Raúl Castro is among the little good that has been done for the personal interest of Cuban citizens; but it didn’t go beyond that.
At that time, in the heat of what seemed like a liberal move by an atavistic and controlling regime, several experts dared to predict that there would be no turning back on the road to renewal in Cuba. Eleven years later, reality has shown the gross error of those who believed that Castroism could be something more than an inexhaustible source of misery.
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