• Submitted by: admin
• Society
• Business and Economy
• 03 / 12 / 2019

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37 years old, Manuel is sure that "the housing deficit in Cuba will be resolved when the elderly pass away. The aging of the population will be what solves the problem of housing. As almost nobody stops today, there will be even empty houses.

"It is sad to think that I will be the owner of a building only when my mother dies. I will inherit the apartment they gave her more than twenty years ago because she is a soldier. My work as a computer will never allow me to buy or build a house of my own.

"The solutions have the State. Homes could be sold in installments, and apartments built or rented to be rented to natural persons. It would be a super profitable business, which should, of course, be adjusted to the wages of the workers.

"How much would the demand not be alleviated if buildings were rented and the money raised used to inject capital for the construction of new houses? Living crowded does not help to have harmony at the base of the society that is the family. An important part of our problems has its genesis in a deformed coexistence, "explains who lives with his wife and two children in one of the two rooms of his mother's apartment.

According to Professor Pablo, "I estimate that in about 40 years I will have a house, if I keep my salary just for that. Time passes and nothing changes, nothing is resolved. Nothing is seen, nor is it felt. It is as if our development is intangible. The plans and the projections are not fulfilled and everything is justified with anything.

"The problem is that if there are no supplies everything remains the same. How can a house be built in this country when there is no availability of cement, steel and other materials, and can only be obtained by buying them from resellers who double their prices? A bag of cement costs you 10CUC and an eight steel bar.

"The other option is to make queues on the trails for months to get everything you need to make or maintain a house. Or what is the same: do not work or buy on the street. I know people who have spent more than two months behind a few bags of cement.

"To that is added that, the same with the reseller that with the State, the sale is a scam. There is no one who bags the material and thus cubes and cubes are stolen. To top, sometimes you have to go to load the materials because the attention is terrible. Meanwhile, in the surroundings, the resellers have the portals full of materials, "he says.

Although the government has promised to recover a housing deficit of more than 900 thousand homes (527 thousand to be built and 402 thousand to be rehabilitated), as well as to respond to the unsatisfied demand of natural resources and labor force and to stabilize the emigration to the largest cities in the world. country, not a few Cubans consider that within a decade the conditions will be equal or worse than the current ones.

In line with what the architect Sara, 46 years old, raises, "now the fashion is to turn houses into workshops of cutting and sewing, warehouses and abandoned offices, but to give them to managers. Meanwhile, most professionals have to live with our parents. We are bad with ourselves because we have lost the shame.

"It's a shame to see that the buildings that fall or that are to be demolished, are used to make parks and not houses. Why can not buildings be built there? Simply because foreign investment is not planned to build housing, but common services, shops, among others, on the ground floor of buildings.

"For that kind of mentality, Cuba is as it is. The absolute control of all powers brings with it the accommodation in power and here there is no counterpart to that accommodation. Therefore, the millionaire losses due to bad planning, for theft and diversion of resources, are not paid by anyone, much less by the government, "says the specialist.

Official data show that more than two million 568 thousand homes have been built in Cuba since 1959 to date and that today the housing fund of the island amounts to more than three million 800 thousand houses.

Five percent of that fund presents precarious conditions, while 39 percent of the buildings are bad or regular. The greatest deterioration is concentrated in Havana, Santiago de Cuba and Holguín.

In the middle of the critical situation, the authorities have said that, except in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, 60 percent of the constructive actions will have to be done by own effort, and the rest will be done by the State.

In the words of Vicente Antonio de Castro and Bermúdez in Cubadebate: "If from 1959 to 1989 that we were dependent on the USSR, the housing fund was not improved, I imagine that in 12 years it will not be achieved ... there is no economy today for sustain that project. As I see it, that's science fiction. "

From the perspective of the gastronomic dependent Marian, 34, who lives rented and has no way to pay the rent, "I would like to have