Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Cuba’s post-socialist housing transformations, from incremental assetisation since the 1990s, to today's depreciation due to the Post-COVID-19 tourism decline, socioeconomic crisis and mass exodus. It is partly based on 15 months of qualitative fieldwork in Havana 2022-2023.

Paper long abstract:

Since the incremental legalization of rent extraction from housing (1997, 2010) and of free house sales (2011), the economic asset dimension of housing in Cuba has been increasingly reinforced both at the layers of collective housing ideations and concrete housing practices. State-led tourism development, the remittance economy and enhanced possibilities of circular/return migration have reshaped housing production, consumption and exchange towards its re-privatization and marketization since the first post-Soviet period (1990s), but especially since the 2011 launching of structural reforms. Yet, these processes have not been sweeping, even and merely economic and de-personalized. Instead, being socially embedded, they are intersected by (transnational) household livelihood strategies; narratives of housing as family heritage, local community interactions, intense and social networking to achieve housing renovation and rent creation. More recently, the post-COVID-19 tourism decline and the present socioeconomic crisis and accompanying mass exodus have led to housing depreciation and the temporary and uncertain abandonment of this highly valued and scarce resource, turning it somehow into a liability and an object that embodies broader processes of undoing and redoing of Cubans’ relations with the nation. This paper explores these transformations to contribute to the scholarship that asserts the variegation of housing privatization in post-socialist transitions, including tensions between financial pursuits and non-financial considerations. A historical and political economic analysis of Cuba’s housing policies and practices since 1960 is complemented by ethnographic vignettes based on 15 months of qualitative fieldwork in Havana, 2022-2023.