Insanity, the Black Market and My Home
In 2015 I purchased a dilapidated home in Cuba. The word dilapidated is a bit of a misnomer in this situation, but a word that needs to be used in explaining the situation to anyone off island.
Most homes in Cuba are dilapidated; the Cuban government has reported that 8.5 homes out of 10 are in need of repairs. These repairs are not what most first world countries think of, fresh paint, fix the rain gutters or rehang that sash window. In Cuba repairs mean years of living with leaky roofs, no glass in the windows, interior walls that do not reach the ceiling, and have been altered so often to have little or no use as an actual wall.
With the onset of the Castro dictatorship, homes that housed one family, now house 10. Apartment buildings are maintained by the building residents themselves, these people have no knowledge of construction skills, they are nurses, doctors and teachers, responsible for repairing the elevator or making sure the electricity of a ten-story building stays on.
So the term dilapidated, in most cases in Cuba, is not an adjective but a state of being.
An added problem in Cuba is that there are almost no building materials. In 2010 the Cuban National Housing Institute allowed building materials to be sold to the general public. Prior to this time the government was the only organization allowed access to building materials.
Cubans are innovative people however, if a building in the neighborhood collapsed, the lot would be stripped of any usable material during the night and patch worked into the project the lucky scavenger was working on.
Despite these new rulings, materials do not sit in a Home Depot or Lowe’s, they still reside in government controlled access points that are ripe for corruption.
Cubans with “connections” purchase these materials and then resell them at higher rates to the public, often times sitting in trucks right outside these distribution spots.
The few Cubans that can afford to purchase building materials do so by word of mouth. This is not only inefficient, but makes the construction costs an unknowable entity, leaving the concept of budgeting out the window.
The reason for the lack of materials is many fold. In 2009 Cubans were given the right to buy and sell homes from each other, this is an incentive to make your home more attractive than others. The second situation that led to a massive shortage of goods was 2012’s hurricane Sandy.
Hurricane Sandy set down in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second largest city, and damaged 171,000 homes. 16,000 of these were destroyed and an additional 22,000 homes were marked as partially destroyed.
Much of the damage done by hurricane Sandy has still not been repaired.
Hurricane Sandy blew the roof off of my abode, leaving the entire home suffering from four years of weather exposure. The older woman I purchased the home from continued to live in it in that condition until she moved in with relatives and sold the home to me.
The first order of business was to build a new cistern. Water shortages are common on the island and a large cistern can be a lifesaver when the government does not turn the water on for weeks at a time.
Next will be the house. The damage was beyond repair, so the only thing that will remain from the original is the concrete façade.
It is often reported in Cuban papers that a home can be built in Cuba for between $8,000 and $10,000 dollars. I am finding that these figures are about 1/3 of reality. This, in a country where the average salary is $20 a month explains another reason why most homes in Cuba have that dilapidated chic look about them.
I am keeping track of every peso spent on the house, but I will have no real feel for the cost or how the money was spent until the house is finished.
Keep checking back, I will be updating the progress as regularly as I can.
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