The spirit of entrepreneurship that so impressed visiting US Chamber of Commerce members in 2014 and the subsequent flood of US journalists, Congress people, and other visitors actually predates the economic “updating” policies. It has its roots in the deprivations of the Blockade and the Special Period. Everyone jokes that the first word of Spanish visitors pick up in Cuba is “resolver”: to resolve, solve problems, figure it out. Spend five minutes in a moving vehicle in Havana and you can probably grasp the significance of “resolver”: the 1950s Chevrolets still on the road modernized with generations of parts, the Ladas functioning with hybrid motors or brakes, cars of whatever era or model which appear to be held together with tape or elastic bands. Yet they all make their way through the bumpy streets of Havana. As Cuban economist Pedro Monreal observed over a decade ago, the iconic tourist image of Cuba as the land time forgot, where people drive around in 1950s automobiles, could evoke a different vision, of the future, not the past. The image of the old automobile could indicate a tremendous Cuban “technical aptitude” that could be the “starting point for reindustrialization” for an export market.10
Ernesto Oroza, a Cuban artist and designer, knows a great deal about Cuban aptitude and resourcefulness. Oroza graduated from Havana’s design school in 1994 when, as he explains it, there was no work for industrial designers like him because there was no industry. The stores were completely empty; instead, people were constantly inventing things they needed, using whatever was at hand. Beer cans were used to extend pipes to repair plumbing, metal trays became antennas, a broken washing machine could be disassembled and re-emerge as a fan. The motor of a fumigation machine or a water pump could be tailored to fit a bicycle perfectly. Oroza spent almost a decade crossing the island in search of such inventions, photographing or collecting them. He calls this phenomenon “technological disobedience,” which means, as he puts it, that “people think beyond the normal capabilities of an object and try to surpass the limitations it imposes on itself.”11 For Oroza, technological disobedience summarizes how Cubans act in relation to technology, but I think this spirit of disobedience lives in Cuban art, economics, and almost all spheres of daily life.
In 2006, the Cuban government began an energy conservation program, which included trying to replace the hulking 1950s-era Westinghouse refrigerators or equally huge Soviet-era versions with more compact and efficient Chinese brands. This inspired a group of artists, who turned fifty discarded fridges into artworks, painting and decorating them almost beyond recognition. The exhibit, “Monstruos devoradores de Energia” (Energy Devouring Monsters), formed part of the 2006 Havana Biennial and later toured Italy, France, and Spain.12 Walk down the pedestrian passageway of Paseo de Prado, the tree-lined street that divides Centro Havana from Old Havana, and one can find echoes of this artistic sensibility in the artist stalls set up on weekends: objects made from typewriter keyboards and rotary telephones, beautifully printed renderings of iconic hexagonal espresso makers, prints or paintings made on recycled pages of notebooks or magazines, in which the original imagery or text became part of the artwork. Callejon de Hamel, an alley in Centro Havana that runs from Animas between Aramburu and Espada, is the site of a community arts and dance project in which bathtubs and other household objects have found new life as canvases and sculptures. Another grand outdoor art installation is Hector Pasual Gallo’s “Garden of Affections,” a sculpture garden a city block or two long, made completely from found objects, located in the Alamar housing neighbourhood just outside Havana. Gallo’s garden was a form of self-therapy, aimed a pulling him out of the depressed funk he fell into during the Special Period.13
For one extended stay in Havana, I packed a roll of tin foil for kitchen usage. This is hardly a necessity, but I remembered seeing it once in a store in Miramar for three times what it costs in Canada, so almost in revenge I decided to bring my own. When a friend noticed it, he asked to borrow some to fix his car. Call it technological disobedience, resourcefulness, or la lucha (the struggle), or rebrand it and celebrate it politically as “entrepreneurship”— they’ve been doing it for a long time in Cuba.
REAL ESTATE AS MAGIC REALISM
After the restaurant boom, perhaps the most-hyped change in La Nueva Cuba is the real estate boom. It became legal to buy and sell properties in Havana in November 2011. The effect was immediate. Havana began to look and feel like a Monopoly game, but with almost inexplicable rules. Magic realist real estate: the prices are in one currency but the taxes are in another; title searching is insecure at best; real estate agents are just beginning to invent themselves; and banks don’t offer mortgages. Only Cubans are legally allowed to buy and sell (and can own only one dwelling), but virtually no Cuban earning in Cuba could afford to pony up the money — tens of thousands, depending on the neighbourhood — in cash required to buy anything. How does one transfer, safely, sacks of cash between parties in a real estate deal? When property is bought and sold legally for the first time in over fifty years, how do you know what it costs?
It’s not that habaneros were stuck in a fifty year game of musical chairs; there was in fact a thriving real estate market in the past, but it took the form of apartment swapping. The permuta (exchange or barter) system was a complex way of transferring properties legally, to get around the strict rules about buying and selling. Parties could trade properties legally, but of course the trades were not equivalent, so a system of evaluation developed. One might trade their small, two-bedroom apartment in Vedado for a larger house in Cerro, for example, recognizing not only the size of the property but the location. One might also include money to even out the exchange, but depending on the amount, that was done under the table. The system was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. To play, one had to have a property to offer. It was an effective but unwieldy and often comical way of moving people around, satirized in the film Se Permuta, which follows a group of characters as they desperately try to find swaps for a number of different properties. The best part of the system was the way it was advertised. People would gather on a designated day on Prado in Old Havana with small signs or photos of the property they had to exchange — like pop-up classifieds.
So, a real estate market didn’t appear out of thin air, but the initial public frenzy of market relations in Cuba was palpable and peculiar. Overnight it seemed that every second house in Havana had a hand-lettered “Se Vende” (for sale) sign hanging off a balcony or window. Actor/director Jorge Perugorría immediately parodied the moment in a film, Se Vende, a black comedy (at which Cubans excel) in which a cash-strapped young woman decides to sell the family crypt, skeletons included.
Some were ecstatic about the changes. Washington’s Brookings Institute think-tank termed changes in property ownership a “positive human rights step” and certainly some habaneros would agree, because several have benefitted from the new system.14 Yet the real estate boom also reveals how, despite all the hullaballoo wrought by the revolution, pre-1959 patterns of wealth and social mobility have changed surprisingly little.
Hope Bastian Martinez is an American graduate student who has been living in Havana for some years, researching a dissertation about daily life in La Nueva Cuba. As housing in Havana changes from a social good to a commodity or source of wealth, Bastian Martinez’s research shows how those with better quality housing, in more desirable locations, are able to benefit the most from the option of selling all or part of their homes, dividing them into apartments or other ways of turning dwellings into money. Those who live in these suddenly valuable properties are, she concludes, basically drawn from two social groups: pre-revolutionary elites who stayed, and revolutionary leaders who resettled in Havana to take positions in government ministries. Both categories are predominantly white. Today, the children and grandchildren of both groups — my friend Emilia calls them (and she says it in English) “Mommy-and-Daddy-kids”— are using the capital in their re-commodified homes to, as Bastian Martinez puts it, “successfully re-establish themselves at
the top of an emerging hierarchy.”15 To top it off, the state draws shockingly little in revenue from the new real estate market. Properties are advertized publicly in a host of on-line real estate websites in CUC. Yet, for tax purposes, the transactions are assessed in MN, based on the officially assessed value of properties from decades ago. Taxes are 4 percent of the purchase price. So, a $50,000, two-bedroom Vedado apartment (an average price in that neighbourhood, one of the most expensive in the city) might be assessed at $15,000 MN, and taxes paid at 4 percent of that. In other words, the state collects the equivalent of 22 CUC rather than 2,000. There are no property taxes.
My long-time landlords, Aldo and Vanessa, are the perfect example of one of Bastian Martinez’s categories of wealth in Havana. Vanessa inherited a two-bedroom, centrally located Vedado apartment from her grandfather, who had operated a successful small business and was able to buy the apartment in the 1940s as the family home. Vanessa grew up there, and when apartment rentals were legalized in 1994, she and her husband Aldo started renting it out. They lived with their extended family in a nearby neighbourhood. Despite a formidable tax system that required a monthly fee even when the apartment was vacant, they managed to save enough to constantly repair and upgrade the place. In a city in which the availability of everything from light bulbs to plumbing supplies can never be taken for granted, this says a great deal. When the rules of the game changed, they were ready to plunge. They traded their own apartment for an even more centrally located four-bedroom apartment, and squeezed themselves — two adults and two teenagers — into a tiny space in the back of their original rental unit. The other family members they lived with (and looked after) were temporarily housed with other relatives. They had two places to rent out (legally, one in each of their names) while they bided their time, constantly upgrading both of them while waiting for another opportunity. It came a year later in the form of two more apartments. So, they sold the newly acquired four-bedroom, and bought two more they are now upgrading; one is small but adequate for themselves and their now reunited extended family to live in, and another, extremely elegant, is to rent out. The last time I was there they showed me, with tremendous pride, the new one that Aldo is still renovating. Showing off the ocean view from the newly painted fifth-floor balcony, Vanessa asked me, “So, is it good enough for tourists?” Then she laughed and asked it another way: “Do you think el enemigo (the enemy) will like it?” Now they have their original rental, plus a swanky rental with an ocean view, plus a decent place for themselves. Bring on the Americans.
Aldo and Vanessa are not the Cuban 1 percent. They are not rich and they are not politically connected, nor were their families. They are the very opposite of pichones: they work constantly, make personal and familial sacrifices, and they are ensuring that their teenage children continue in school and get as much as they can from the post-secondary system. They fill out forms, pay their taxes, and they don’t break the law — or at least beyond what most people do, and have always done, especially in the early days of landlord cuentapropismo.
What has given them a leg up in Havana’s new real estate world is the simple good fortune of having had a middle-class grandfather with enough money to buy a nice apartment in a central location seventy years ago. Seen from this perspective, the advantages of being white and middle class have outlived all the revolutionary commotion — ideology, laws, propaganda, agitation, education, conflict — of over fifty years.
Housing is one of the most serious problems in the city of Havana. The housing that was constructed after the revolution, usually drab three- or four-storey concrete apartment blocks, relieved Havana’s chronic problems a bit. But they created their own problems. “Micros,” as they are known because they were often constructed by “microbrigades” of volunteer workers, are almost universally disliked because of what are considered to be shoddy materials and workmanship. Real estate ads in Havana usually start with a reference to when the place was built, and “capitalist construction” is the key phrase that makes a building desirable.
The housing problems people face have multiple sources, but the problems boil down to quality and scarcity. For some the problem is overcrowding. Cubans live in extended families but not always because they want to. Most habaneros still live in the home in which their parents or grandparents grew up. I know several multigenerational families of eight or ten people who live in two- or three-bedroom apartments. Some of these arrangements seem to me to be remarkably functional, but other situations take me aback. Couples split up but continue to live together because they have nowhere to go. People live with extended family members whom they can’t stand or who can’t stand them. When babies arrive, already tense relations can get thrown even further off balance. Middle-aged people with jobs and kids figure out how to provide constant care for the aging parents they live with. Overcrowding has been addressed by a variety of renovations to fit family sizes and circumstances: houses with high ceilings are divided vertically to double the space, walls are rejigged in living rooms or dining rooms to make extra bedrooms, and entire apartments are constructed on rooftops. These solutions, usually undertaken without regulation and with makeshift materials, can simply add to another already existing problem: the physical condition of Havana’s housing stock is disastrous. Roofs and windows leak, and main floors and basements have been flooded so often they retain the odour and other signs of seawater. For North Americans, Cuban sun and sea air are a highly prized, mid-winter treat, but both can be brutal to live with as constant companions. The sun beaming through open windows makes mincemeat out of sofas and chairs; sea air corrodes the paint on buildings surprisingly quickly. Government funds have been allocated to subsidize home repair or renovation, but the help is a drop in the bucket.
Is the real estate boom going to solve these problems? The Monopoly game of Havana real estate isn’t only confined to the Mommy-and-Daddy-kids of Vedado or Miramar. A few Havana friends who live in other neighbourhoods have been able to take advantage of the real estate changes to improve their living conditions. One family in Cerro consisting of several people in their seventies “traded up” by moving down. They couldn’t cope with their fourth-floor, elevator-less apartment any longer, and they also wanted to expand to have a room to accommodate visiting grandchildren. They found a larger main-floor apartment in their neighbourhood and traded for their old place and a negotiated sum of money. Through the permuta system they could have done this before; now it was completely legal. Another person, a single mother with two children, settled a long-standing divorce negotiation with her ex, who now lives overseas, and purchased a tiny apartment. Prudently, she also purchased construction materials to add an extra space for her children as they grow. Mirta spent a few months couch-surfing with friends in order to rent out her place in Cerro to a visiting Bolivian medical student and his wife who wanted an apartment instead of just a room. After she’d made a few months’ rent, she moved back in. She’s thinking of selling her place and joining up with a Canadian friend to buy a bigger and more central place and share it with what would be a part-time internationally commuting roommate. My Spanish teacher sold her large five-bedroom home and downsized, moving across the street with her daughter to something smaller, and pocketing probably tens of thousands of CUC in the process.
These stories of individuals finding their way, “resolving,” as they might say, through real estate don’t do much to change the big picture, because the big picture is just so enormous. In 2014, filmmaker Alejandro Ramírez Anderson completed an astonishingly honest documentary about Havana’s housing problem, disguised, so to speak, as a music video. He filmed the neighbourhood concerts that Cuban music legend Silvio Rodríguez began performing in 2010. Silvio did these neighbourhood concerts in recognition of the problems that poverty and a poor transportation system create for people who live in far-flung areas of the city, without the means, despite low ticket prices, to attend concerts in the theatres of Old Havana or Vedado. He decided to bring
his music to various neighbourhoods, organizing concerts all over the city and inviting well-known musicians to join him. I had the great luck to see Omara Portuando sing with Silvio in La Lisa, a neighbourhood in western Havana. I strolled to a local community centre with Zaira and her mother and there was Omara, the Grand Diva of Cuban music, wearing a blue velour tracksuit. Omara commanded an audience of hundreds from a makeshift stage beside a basketball court. “It was like seeing Barbara Streisand and Bob Dylan play together in the parking lot of Walmart in the suburbs,” I tried to explain to my students, but I think this was another untranslatable Havana moment.
Silvio invited Alejandro Ramírez Anderson to film the concerts. As Ramírez Anderson explained to our students after we watched his film, “I realized after about ten minutes of filming that this was not simply a documentary about Silvio, it was also about the neighbourhoods.” Silvio agreed, and the result is a documentary called Canción de Barrio (Neighbourhood Song), one of the most humane and angry films about poverty that I have seen, in any country. Residents of a dozen different Havana and area neighbourhoods welcome Silvio — and Ramírez Anderson — and at the same time they speak frankly about the condition of their daily lives, and especially their housing. They invite the camera to follow them through their homes, pointing out holes in the ceilings and gaps in the floor and exposing the sheet-metal shanties that occasionally constitute a bedroom. They speak directly to the camera about government neglect and lies and their frustration with the absence of functioning municipal services. All interspersed with Silvio’s signature soundtrack, edited brilliantly so that the social commentary of the music augments the visual veracities of the camera. The film has received tremendous reviews inside Cuba, where clearly middle-class people can be just as oblivious to the daily realities of the poor as are people the world over.
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