Vertical Hells in Havana
The microbrigade apartment buildings
HAVANA TIMES – I live on the fifth floor of a “microbrigade” building, something very close to purgatory. The neighbor’s dog urinates in front of my door. “That brings good luck,” she says, while her current lover honks the horn at 5:00 a.m. On the balcony across the way, two women weave gossip. Down below, a neighbor shouts obscenities when the power goes out. That’s life in the microbrigade buildings: concrete cages in vertical hells, where the elevator is a myth and water is carried up in buckets.
The Concrete Chaos
Cuba’s housing crisis is a failure accumulated over decades. With the massive nationalization of 1960, all urban properties were expropriated, eliminating the private real estate market. Housing was assigned based on “revolutionary merit,” not on real need. In the 1970s, the “microbrigades” emerged — groups of untrained workers who built apartment blocks with defective materials and inhumane designs (38 m² for families of five). Today, 45% of these buildings lack a functioning elevator.
A key fact is that in 2024, fewer homes were built than during the Special Period crisis of the 1990s.
To this chaos are added countless urban design violations. Desperation and the lack of real solutions have generated a black market for space. One can’t speak of this without mentioning the barbacoas: makeshift lofts added to rooms because of overcrowding and lack of housing. In Central Havana, 47% of families build them inside their apartments. But most alarming are the families occupying abandoned buildings, such as the old Trotcha Hotel in Old Havana, living there without water or electricity.
The last link in this chain are the construction workers who steal materials to sell on the black market, where absolutely everything needed to build or repair a home can be found—at outrageously high prices.
Basic services are no exception to these grim conditions. Everything related to essential needs has become an unreachable luxury for most. Havana’s water system is a monument to decay. Residents receive water only two or three times a week. Energy shortages are the other side of the coin, with blackouts lasting up to 12 hours a day. Meanwhile, the luckier neighbors make up for the lack of electricity with kerosene generators, filling the buildings with smoke.
In the End…
In the end, I’m just one of the many neighbors living in this building. I’m grateful for each sunrise, with the irony of seeing the ceiling beams about to collapse still standing. In the meantime, I try to find a way to live differently, to dream of another reality. At night, I hear the footsteps of young people on the stairs, their laughter and loud music.
Despite the noise, I can feel the essence of this place—but not the one told in official histories.
The spirit of the building lives instead in the sigh of a mother who managed to cook a meal, in the weary gaze of the tenth-floor neighbor as he arrives with two buckets of water, and in the laughter of children running through the hallways.
The microbrigade buildings are home to many families—a precarious, unjust home. The building once bore witness to revolutionary slogans during its construction; now it listens to the complaints and prayers of those who live within its walls.
The neighbor’s dog urinates in front of my door again. Today is another “lucky” day inside this concrete cage.
I saw something the last time I was in Cuba that really disturbed me. The next door neighbor to my casa particular invited me over for lunch one day. Before we sat down to eat, I asked if I could wash my hands. I had never been to the bathroom in this neighbor’s home so the wife directed me to the 2nd door on the left in the hall. Inside the bathroom, I noticed that the toilet seemed to be full of urine. I watched my hands and returned to the dining room. I asked the neighbors if their toilet was broken and they simply said that they were conserving water by flushing only when they did a #2. They said it very casually and without shame so I didn’t react. But yukkkkk! Is this or has this been normal? Guys, it smelled like urine in the hall. Maybe a couple of days since anyone had to poop. Again, is this a Cuban thing now?
Strangle that wretched dog !!!!
The worst are the collapsing buildings in Havana. Many are already part-way collapsed where, for example, one side of a building including the roof has collapsed into rubble; but people continue to live there next to the open air, next to the rubble.
There are a lot people living in partially collapsed buildings or in buildings where the entire thing is about to crumble to the ground on top of the inhabitants.
Cuba has been lucky avoiding class 4 or 5 hurricanes or earthquakes.
Those would be a catastrophes where hundreds or thousands would die.