According to news accounts, Cubans lined up Thursday morning to buy newspapers that explained the biggest change to their economy in decades.
Cuba has created a private market for housing. Effective November 10, Cubans will have the right to buy and sell their homes at prices they set. While the government will collect a modest 4 percent tax at both ends of the transaction, this economic reform will have ripple effects for Cuban families and the Cuban economy that are far-reaching, irreversible, and real.
As Marc Frank wrote in the Financial Times:
The easing of restrictions on property ownership is likely to reshape Cuban cities, spur real estate development and speed renovation of Cuba's picturesque but dilapidated housing stock. It is also expected to reconfigure Cuban conceptions of class as some homeowners cash in their properties and areas of Havana are gentrified.
Under the current system, Cuban housing has been in crisis. While Cubans were guaranteed places to live, the inability to buy and sell their properties curtailed mobility. Generations of families are crowded into homes, many run down, sometimes with divorced couples living together, because, as the Wall Street Journal succinctly said, "there was nowhere else to go."
A decision to move from one house to another -- which entailed informal efforts to locate properties that people were willing to trade and permission from the government -- forced Cubans into grey market activities on one hand and into a cumbersome bureaucracy on the other.
"What happens now is that all that bureaucracy and all that hassle will disappear," says Dr. Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a long-time diplomat and professor at the University of Havana, who explains in this interview what the new law means for Cubans.
The immediate benefits are clear. Cubans, especially those with family supporters abroad, will be able to invest in housing and renovate their homes, which will in turn create demand for construction and other services offered by the newly-legalized small businesses in Cuba, raising incomes and adding new private sector jobs. "To say that it's huge is an understatement," said Pedro Freyre, an expert in Cuban-American legal relations who teaches at Columbia Law School, in an interview with the New York Times.
President Obama, who has been responsible for incremental but positive reforms in U.S. policy toward Cuba, has time and again voiced his skepticism about the sweep and significance of the Cuban economic reform process, telling Spanish-speaking reporters in September this year: "We have not seen evidence they have been sufficiently aggressive in changing their policies economically..."
That depends on what your definition of "sufficiently aggressive" might be. If it means Cuba must completely undo its economic and political system as required by the Helms-Burton law, we need not hold our breath. Cuba is not going to do that.
But if it means creating private markets in housing for the first time since the revolution, giving Cubans the pride that comes with owning and fixing up their own homes, opening opportunities for capital formation, establishing clear regulations and liberties under the Rule of Law through organic changes that come from within, all of which give Cubans the opportunity to lead more prosperous and independent lives, we think the President of the United States ought to applaud and acknowledge that.
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Cuban house market opens up | euronews, world news
Cuba's housing market: Swap shop | The Economist
New law creates real estate market in Cuba - CNN.com
Cubans hail a private property revolution | World news | The Observer
FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE: Cuba's smoke-and-mirror reforms - By José R. Cárdenas- November 7, 2011
The new order restricts people to "ownership" of one permanent residence and one vacation home (as if the average Cuban is in any position to own a second home); all transactions must be approved by the State and the construction industry remains state-controlled; and the regime itself admits this order reflects no backsliding on the preeminence of the State in controlling the country's economic and political systems.
Those rights exist only where they are rooted in a credible, impartial, and transparent legal superstructure that can protect one's property, settle disputes, and guarantee transactions against the predations of the State. Anything less is a rigged game where the State is the dealer.
Translation: Cubans' ability to "own" property, trade, or leverage their property to build capital will continue to exist at the sufferance of the State. And what the State giveth, the State can taketh away. The bottom line is that, ultimately, all Cubans will really own is a piece of paper that says they own something.
With average Cubans on the island too poor to buy or improve their dilapidated dwellings, their hope is relatives in Miami and elsewhere will remit even more cash to the island attempting to improve their relations' situation.
CLICK LINK FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE!
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/07/cubas_smoke_and_mirror_reforms
From this new capitalistic perspective, there is also the additional fact that, in the first place, a large portion of this "new housing market" is made up of government confiscated/stolen property, with preexisting, un-recompensed titles. Some properties were later sold to European and Canadian investors but subsequently, re-appropriated by the Cuban government to be re-sold again even now,
THIS NEW LAW IS ONLY A PLOY FOR THE CASTRO GOVERNMENT TO GET MORE MONEY FROM THE CUBANS IN THE DIASPORA AND TO BRING THE MONEY FROM THE BLACK MARKET INTO THEIR POCKET!
BBC NEWS:Cuba's housing crisis-There is an acute housing crisis in Cuba.
Even before the recent hurricanes that damaged over half a million homes, accommodation was one of the greatest causes of complaint on the island.
The black market in property and building materials is thought to be huge.
And as Linda Pressly finds out in Crossing Continents, in a nation where it is illegal to buy and sell property, Cubans have come up with unique ways of getting around the regulations, and securing a new home.
BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents was broadcast on Monday, 29 December, 2008 at 2030 GMT. It was repeated on Thursday, 1 January, 2009 at 1230 GMT.
Reporter: Linda Pressly
Producer: Polly Hope
CLICK LINK SO YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE STORY AND THEN USE "LAUNCH IN STAND ALONE PLAYER"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/7795824.stm