Qual será a reação nos jantares chics de Higienopolis e nas conversas la pelas bandas de perdizes e butanta? Incredulidade, resmungos, enquanto beberica vinho e aprecia um bom queijo frances. Ah!!! bravos revolucionários, o último bastião parece ser mesmo os adolescentes ainda encantados com o canto de sereia dos vendedores de ilusões nos lugares de sempre...
José is an eager almost-entrepreneur with big plans for Cuban real estate. Right now he works illegally on trades, linking up families who want to swap homes and pay a little extra for an upgrade.
But when Cuba legalizes buying and selling by the end of the year — as the government promised again this week — José and many others expect a cascade of changes: higher prices, mass relocation, property taxes and a flood of money from Cubans in the United States and around the world.
“There’s going to be huge demand,” said José, 36, who declined to give his last name, stepping away from the crowd and keeping an eye out for eavesdroppers. “It’s been prohibited for so long.”
Private property is the nucleus of capitalism, of course, so the plan to legitimize it here in a country of slogans like “socialism or death” strikes many Cubans as jaw-dropping. Indeed, most people expect onerous regulations and already, the plan outlined by the state media would suppress the market by limiting Cubans to one home or apartment and requiring full-time residency.
Yet even with some state control, experts say, property sales could transform Cuba more than any of the economic reforms announced by President Raúl Castro’s government, some of which were outlined in the National Assembly on Monday. Compared with the changes already passed (more self-employment and cell-phone ownership), or proposed (car sales and looser emigration rules), “nothing is as big as this,” said Philip Peters, an analyst with the Lexington Institute.
The opportunities for profits and loans would be far larger than what Cuba’s small businesses offer, experts say, potentially creating the disparities of wealth that have accompanied property ownership in places like Eastern Europe and China.
Havana in particular may be in for a move back in time, to when it was a more stratified city. “There will be a huge rearrangement,” said Mario Coyula, Havana’s director of urbanism and architecture in the 1970s and ’80s. “Gentrification will happen.”
Broader effects could follow. Sales would encourage much-needed renovation, creating jobs. Banking would expand because, under newly announced rules, payments would come from buyers’ accounts. Meanwhile, the government, which owns all property now, would hand over homes and apartments to their occupants in exchange for taxes on sales — impossible in the current swapping market where money passes under the table.
And then there is the role of Cuban emigrants. While the plan seems to prohibit foreign ownership, Cuban-Americans could take advantage of Obama administration rules letting them send as much money as they like to relatives on the island, fueling purchases and giving them a stake in Cuba’s economic success. “That is politically an extremely powerful development,” Mr. Peters said, arguing that it could spur policy changes by both nations.
The rate of change, however, will likely depend on complications peculiar to Cuba. The so-called Pearl of the Antilles struggled with poor housing even before the 1959 Revolution, but deterioration, rigid rules and creative work-arounds have created today’s warren of oddities.
There are no vacancies in Havana, Mr. Coyula pointed out. Every dwelling has someone living in it. Most Cubans are essentially stuck where they are.
On the waterfront of central Havana, children peek out from buildings that should be condemned, with a third of the facade missing.
Blocks inland, Cubans like Elena Acea, 40, have subdivided apartments to Alice in Wonderland proportions. Her two-bedroom is now a four-bedroom, with a plywood mezzanine where two stepsons live one atop the other, barely able to stand in their own rooms.
Like many Cubans, she hopes to move — to trade her apartment for three smaller places so the elder son, 29, can start his own family. “He’s getting married,” she said. “He has to move out.”
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