Despite guarantees, homelessness creeps into Cuba
Despite new housing developments, the shortage of homes is too acute to give many Cubans the shelter they are promised
From Havana Bureau Chief Lucia Newman. CNN. June 6, 2000. Web posted at: 10:13 p.m. EDT (0213 GMT)
HAVANA (CNN) -- For Cubans, decent housing is guaranteed in the constitution. But the state has been unable to cope with a housing shortage that has been building for decades.
On a recent night in a small Havana park, a couple and their toddler prepare to spend their fifth night on the park bench.
"I'm desperate, with a 2-year-old daughter and with no place to sleep, spending the whole night out on the street," Lidia Perez said.
Dianeya Ninterian, from Colon, Matanzas, lost her home in a hurricane two years ago. She tells a similar story.
"I've slept in the bus terminals with my two daughters; at the home of friends one day here, one day there," Ninterian said. "Last week I spent 24 hours sitting with my children at the entrance of the local Communist Party office, waiting for them to give me some kind of solution to my problem."
Though these cases may be the exception rather than the rule, they illustrate a growing breakdown in the Cuban social system.
In Havana, the problem has reached crisis levels. The Cuban capital is home to 2.2 million people, 20 percent of the nation's population on 1 percent of Cuban territory.
"This is a socialist country, where we should receive help, where the state must give us a hand, even if it's to give us the means to build with our own hands," said Miguel, a Havana resident who would not provide his last name.
Until two years ago, more buildings were collapsing from lack of repair and decay than those being built.
And though the government is planning to build 30,000 new homes, 60,000 will have to be demolished because they are beyond repair.
Exacerbating the housing squeeze has been the ongoing trend of people moving to the Cuban capital. According to figures from the Cuban government, during the 1950s, the annual rate of migration to Havana was between 20,000 and 25,000 people. In 1959, when President Fidel Castro came to power, that number increased to 43,000.
Between 1965 and 1990, Cuba managed to regulate the migratory flow towards the capital to about 10,000 people a year.
But the alarm bells began to ring again in the mid-1990s, when the net internal migration rate for the capital went from 13,000 in 1990, to 17,000 in 1994, and reached more than 28,000 in 1996.
Housing authorities admit it is an uphill battle.
"There are many accumulated problems," said Mario Cabello, president of the Cuban Housing Institute. "... In Havana only 53 percent of homes are in good condition; before it was 47 percent, but it's such a discreet improvement that the population doesn't notice it."
The shortage of homes is so daunting authorities keeping statistics of the need. And no matter what the constitution states, the government admits the country does not have nearly enough building materials or manpower to give everyone the home they have been promised.
