New Film Reveals Critical Havana Housing Conditions
Facade of Elena, the building in Centro Habana which inspired Marcelo Martin’s new documentary
From Café Fuerte
HAVANA TIMES — While Havana’s old town continues to experience a visible architectural and socio-cultural renewal, unattended buildings in the neighboring borough of Centro Habana languish and deteriorate before the eyes of its tenants and the inertia of government authorities.
The area was once a zone of transition between Havana’s colonial-era settlements and the more modern buildings that were being constructed in the fledgling neighborhood of Vedado. Its magnificent edifices profited from an urban development program undertaken between 1827 and 1840. Today, nothing but a decaying image of these achievements remains.
Elena (2012), a documentary by filmmaker Marcelo Martin Herrera, affords us powerful images of the collapse of Centro Habana, which continues to crumble and offers no hope of ever becoming a habitable neighborhood again. The 42-minute film takes its title from the name of one of the buildings located on 117 Vapor Street, between Espada and Hospital Streets, built in 1927.
The result of three years of investigative journalism and interviews with the tenants of the ramshackle building, Elena is one of the most compelling testimonies about Havana’s architectural debacle produced in recent times.
A graduate of Cuba’s Higher Institute of Industrial Design (ISDI), screenwriter and director Martin Herrera (Havana, 1980) began his career making graphic designs and animated publicity for television. He is currently a filmmaker and publicist attached to the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC).
230 buildings collapse each year
The film was screened at ICAIC’s 12th Young Filmmakers’ Festival this past April, where it received an honorary mention. To date, it has not been scheduled for screening at any of Cuba’s movie theatres or shown on Cuban television.
With 163,763 inhabitants and covering an area of five square kilometers (a mere one percent of the capital’s total surface area), Centro Habana is Havana’s most densely-populated neighborhood.
According to official figures, the neighborhood is made up of 46,277 residences, 22,712 of which are in poor condition and 4,198 of which are in a critical state. Some 230 buildings collapse within the boundaries of Centro Habana every year.
A total of 24,311 of its residents are currently living in “temporary shelters”, a government euphemism used to describe facilities where large numbers of homeless people are lodged, usually for long periods of time.
“I haven’t seen a news report that captures the country’s debacle as honestly and as unflinchingly in years,” a Cuban State journalist told CaféFuerte. “Though Elena is a documentary about a concrete, everyday reality, it also captures, through metaphor, the irrecoverable ruins of Cuban history and of an architectural heritage that is vanishing all around us.”
No stairways
Our source (who asked to remain anonymous) believes that now, when the assemblies in preparation for the 9th Congress of the Federation of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) scheduled for July 14 and 15 are underway, Elena ought to be shown to communications professionals.
Martin opens his documentary with a screen showing Article 9 of Cuba’s Constitution: “The State shall work to ensure that no citizen is denied comfortable housing.” He closes the film with a dedication: “To Havana, a city that is still waiting.”
The documentary began to be shot in October of 2009, when a work brigade from the Salvador Allende Contingent was expected to undertake the building’s renovation. Repair work had actually begun earlier, in 2000, but had been suspended.
“The building’s stairway collapsed, like New York’s Twin Towers,” an interviewee who identifies himself as “Manolo” remarks in the documentary. Elena’s tenants were moved to a shelter, but many returned to the building, the victims of daily thefts and despair.
“Everything I owned was stolen from me at the shelter. I lived in the shelter for eight years and I have absolutely no hope of getting anywhere,” a woman says.
Though Elena is not suitable for residence, it is still inhabited, like many other buildings in Centro Habana. To access it, tenants use a corridor built between the edifice and a neighboring building. Many apartments and rooms have no kitchens or bathrooms, and leakages and sewage, full of excrement and worms, are a common sight.
A never-ending lie
“All of this is one big lie, an insult…I have devoted my entire life to the revolution, in Cuba and abroad,” tells Gregorio, an elderly gentleman who took part in internationalist combat missions when young.
Gregorio lives surrounded by putrid waters that overflow into his quarters constantly. He is forced to take out bucketfuls of sewage regularly. He tells that a public official offered to unclog his drains, but asked for 40 dollars for the service (about one thousand Cuban pesos).
“I don’t have 40 dollars. I can offer 100 or 200 pesos (4 to 8 dollars), at most, because I can’t afford anything else with my pension,” Gregorio explains.
Emilio, another tenant, brings a crushing reality to the fore: “A person can’t go 25 years without a bathroom or kitchen.”
Elena documents the telephone calls to different State institutions and the headquarters of the construction brigade, which were unable to offer an explanation for their evident neglect of the building. All they secure are evasive replies and promises which, at the close of 2012, had not yet been fulfilled.
“The documentary opens with nightmarish images of unnamable bugs moving in the waste water that floods the building’s quarters every day, and closes with the photographs and addresses of other buildings in Centro Habana – a small sample of buildings as deteriorated as Elena, or already a pile of rubble,” filmmaker Eduardo del Llano wrote in his blog. “Elena is one of those critical pieces which, in addition to being rigorous and energetic, reveal imagination and even a sense of humor. It is a protest piece, but it is also cinema.”
Anyone can qualify for the housing scheme as long as they have been resident in Marinaleda for two years.
The Spanish Government doesn’t have anything to do with the scheme. It is done at the Municipal level with some support from the Regional Government.
The future owner contributes over 450 hours to help build the property but gets support from architects, builders and materials supplied by the scheme. The future owner comes to an agreement with the other stakeholders as to the installment amount and period of repayment eg 75 years. During this period the owner can’t sell but can pass down to their children or give away to someone else.
This may amount to subsidy, but who cares, they don’t have higher taxes or lower wages in Marinaleda than anywhere else in Spain. It can be covered by savings in other areas. The town is based around an agricultural cooperative and one or two factories where everyone is paid an equal salary so no need for massive directors’ fees or shareholders to pay off. The municipal authorities including the mayor don’t accept any salary and being a modern day Shangri la the town decided they could do without a municipal police force.
There is no unemployment, capital flight, drowning in debt, forced evictions etc as the rest of Spain and the mayor is so popular he has been reelected every four years since 1979.
Not all my tears Grady, just the ones appropriately expressed on HT. You offend me with your accusation that I would uphold ‘mass-death dealing’. I would not lay at your feet all the evils and destruction done in the name of socialism. As a socialist, should you be stained with Stalin’s murders or Mao’s massacres I do not share your manner of reasoning, which is my right, that capitalism is to blame for all that is wrong in the world. I do believe strongly with my brain and my heart that the Castros have caused the Cuban people more than a half-century of unnecessary suffering and have destined future generations to the burdensome task of rebuilding a once beautiful but flawed island.
There was a lot of detail left out of that report. The people are given free land, that’s nice, but who qualifies for it? Anybody?
What about the unsustainable economics behind the crazy scheme?
The people are given free building materials, which are paid for by the state government, and the labour is performed by state employed workers. How does the state pay for these materials and wages? The Spanish government is already drowning in debt, and the attempts to increase revenue by raising taxes is prompting massive capital flight out of Spain. Capital flight contributes to the growing economic crisis by reducing investiment and increasing unemployment. By increasing spending and adding more debt, the Spanish government is feeding a vicious cycle of unemployment & rising debt.
And the happy new home owner is going to pay off the cost at 15 euros per month? Given an estimated 50,000 euro cost of materials, that will take him 270 years to pay back the cost. With borrowing costs for the Spanish government over 4.5% and rising, the 15 Euros per month wont even cover interest on those loans.
So your idea of a Communist utopia is one where the government loans out money nobody will ever pay back, paid for by a government drowning in debt. Unemployment, debt and taxes continue to rise until the economy grinds to a halt.
The mayor of this town stole food from a supermarket as an election stunt. What’s he going to steal next when there are no more supermarkets?
The Ontario Landlord Tenant Act includes a number of significant protections for renters, making it extremely difficult for the landlord to evict a tenant, and limiting rent increases to annual rates set by the government.
In Canada, 69 percent of people own their own homes. As you might expect, the rates vary from the lowest income quintile at 38% home ownership to 93% at the highest income quintile. But that’s quite a remarkable statistic, isn’t it: 38% of Canadians whose income places them below the poverty line actually own their own home. A large percentage of those in the bottom quintile who rent receive government subsidies or live in rental subsidized public housing.
Are you suggesting that those people with middle-class to affluent incomes who choose to rent are somehow being hoodwinked and robbed against their will? Can you back up that bizarre claim with any evidence? Does this secret coercion exist in all other forms of commerce and contracts freely entered into by the citizens of a free and democratic society? Was I somehow robbed by an evil capitalist when I walked into a bakery of my own free will and bought a loaf of bread?
You may continue to talk about your Cooperative Republic idea as much as you like. You passionately argue for it on the basis of it’s purported benefits. Saving civilization and the environment are laudable goals, but merely having those goals doesn’t explain how your scheme would achieve them.
You have not yet explained how any aspect of your cooperative republic, including your novel banking system, can actually work in practice. Yet you react to any mild criticism I have offered as if I murdered your child.
You expound on the alleged amazing benefits of your scheme, while avoiding any realistic explanations of how it works in practice, and then you insult people who disagree with you. Are you sure that’s a good way to go about building a movement?
Yes, it is sad. But, Moses, thousands of men, women and children die in the US each year, due to a lack of healthcare services. Why are all your tears for Cuba?
You focus on incidents in Cuba to prove certain points, but you uphold and advocate the mass death-dealing monopoly capitalist system which is a horror.
If only you would use your brain and your heart to know the truth, and stop spewing all this venom against the Castro brothers.
Thanks for a prompt and well-reasoned reply. I can’t argue with anything in it. I just feel so bad for the Cuban people.
What is of great interest to me is what state control of banking and credit–both financial capital credit and consumer credit–does to a socialist nation’s economy.
All such credit is generated under capitalism on a fractional-reserve principle.
In such a system, financial institutions create vast sums of systemic money as interest-bearing debt. But as the debt principle is amortized, it disappears on the institution’s ledger. What remains is the institution’s interest profits.
So, financial capital (money) is constantly being created, but an equal amount will be wiped off the books upon amortization of the debt.
It seems to me, Moses, that the erroneous ideological mechanism of Marxian economics cannot make use of this very functional, historically-evolved fractional-reserve monetary system; and that this may be the reason that all state-monopoly experiments in socialism have produced severe financial constipation and, in many cases, political mortality.
What most concerns me is how, if the people in our country should ever give a political mandate to our cooperative republican party, we would reorganize our monetary system. I feel that this is the very heart of the authentic socialist transformation of society.
What is happening in Cuba is not as important to me, as what is possible up here in the US and Canada.
The Cooperative Republic(s) which you so disdain is what is possible, and this is my main concern.
It is evident by your standard landlord argument regarding renting of one’s “own free will” however, that your heart is with stealing the equity paid for by renters, and sucking as much more out of their pockets as possible.
Talking to you about a new cooperative society–that, BTW, might save the environment and civilization–is probably a waste.
Your ideas sound a bit like the Communist utopia they are building in southern Spain. see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22763464 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinaleda,_Spain.
Sadly, the second floor apartment of a mother and young daughter collapsed Sunday in Trinidad killing both inhabitants. Despite Grady’s attempt at tit-for-tat, this aspect of Castro’s socialist experiment in Cuba is literally killing people.
Grady, you wrote,
“The real “capital” needed for rebuilding the Cuban housing stock is the Cuban people. And so, the question of rebuilding is how to mobilize the people for the task.”
The Castros have owned the Cuban people and used every trick in the book to mobilize the people. The results are there for all to see: a slow motion catastrophe.
Of course, although it’s a charming metaphor, the people aren’t really “capital”. Capital mean money available for investment. That’s where you go on about “fractional reserve credit”… and so on. Quick question: have you actually shown your plan to an actual economist? I’m no expert, but it sounds to me like an exercise in printing worthless paper script.
You are correct that the PCC leaders have no idea what authentic workable socialism is. Furthermore, they don’t care. I’m not convinced anybody knows of such a thing.
If you are arguing for an expansion of independent co-operatives in Cuba, that is a goal I would support whole heartedly. Such a development would be a positive trend and help off-set the overwhelming dominance of the military-state-corporate complex which controls Cuba.
I sincerely thank you for your considerate reply. I understood what you believe must take place in
order to generate the tens of billions of dollars necessary to restore, rebuild and expand the deteriorating housing stock in Cuba. It was not gobbledygook to me. However, the process you describe, even under the best of conditions, meaning no US embargo, expanded commerce, etc.is a slow one and would still require many years to accumulate as deposits the capital necessary to generate the loans to pay for the work needed to be done. Grady, a housing crisis of epic proportions
looms large in Cuba and it must be resolved soon. At least within the lifetime of the current generation. If not, the next generation, today’s infants and toddlers will have
no place to live. Cubans are living on top of each other now. The large quantity of vacant housing is misleading. Most of this vacant housing is inhabitable, even by Cuban standards. Buildings are collapsing daily, with no
new housing being built to replace it. While your solution may or may not be viable, it is certainly not a timely one given the urgency of the housing problem in Cuba
Hope is not a strategy. Sixty one* years of dictatorship prove that fact.
(*7 years of Batista and 54 of the Castros)
Thanks for the challenge. I’ll try, in very limited space.
The real “capital” needed for rebuilding the Cuban housing stock is the Cuban people. And so, the question of rebuilding is how to mobilize the people for the task.
What Cuba needs is a fractional-reserve monetary system, where credit is extended, and systemic money is created thereby, to bring the workforce into action, building homes.
So, Moses, the “billions of dollars” of which you speak, could be generated internally with an appropriate cooperative republican financial system.
Such a non-usury system would be even more effective in Cuba, than in capitalist countries, if mortgage institutions could be owned cooperatively by both depositors and institution associates, making credit extensions for a lucrative but one-time-only credit generation fee.
Unfortunately, the socialist state has a monopoly on credit generation–as I understand–and so, it is unlikely that fractional-reserve credit can develop under the present constipated, Marxian configuration.
Another related–probably insurmountable–problem is that the surplus-value generated by the working people is preemptively hogged up by the state, with little going directly into the hands of those who produced it, above bare subsistence.
This means that potential cooperative-bank savers don’t have much money to save. Thus, coop banks would not be able to generate credit on a fractional-reserve principle, because they would not have the basic savings deposits which would be required make it possible.
But the cooperative republican form of socialism our movement postulates would get rid of the state-monopoly stupidity in all spheres, including the financial sector. A majority of the surplus-value produced would then flow into the hands of the working people, create a vibrant, socialist small entrepreneurial class, and allow for ample personal savings deposits.
The problem at present is, the PCC leaders do not have a clue as to what authentic, workable socialism is. What I advocate therefore, if they were listening, would probably sound to them like gobbledygook. Cheers.
I have to admit, Griffin, that your last three paragraphs may be correct . . . but I can only hope that they are not.
So if a person living in Canada choses of his own free will to rent an apartment for a price set by the open market, he is being robbed? And this is because we Canadians have yet to embrace Grady’s idiosyncratic co-operative socialist republic. OK, we’ll get right on that.
You are dreaming if you think the family clique who own dictatorship in Havana is going to wake up one morning and say to each other,
“Coño! You know what? Our state-ownership socialist sytem isn’t working so let’s all switch to Grady’s co-operative socialist republic. I realize this will result in the end of all our perks and privileges, and a loss of our control on political power, but it’ll be for the good of the country.”
No. The problem with the Castro dictatorship is not that they haven’t heard of a better way to do things. The problem is that they insist on holding onto power forever and will never listen to any other opinion. Yours included.
My usual sarcasm aside, how does your version of socialism buy the brick and mortar, as well as pay salaries for the architects, engineers, and building contractors necessary to bring Cuban housing back from the bring of epic disaster? In my limited capitalist mind (ok, a little sarcastic), Cuba need tens of billions of dollars to purchase the materials and services necessary to rebuild. Simply changing who makes the decisions, to me, is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Briefly, please explain. Finally, and don’t take my word for it, Cubans are tired of being someone’s experiment.
Nothing demonstrates the utter failure of US monopoly-capitalism, Griffin, like the 50 million households suffering under tenant serfdom, with the landlords and banks stealing much of their monthly earnings, and the tenants getting none of the equity for which they pay.
I suspect it is pretty much the same in your country of Canada.
The “crumbling buildings of Havana,” like the general housing shortage–and other shortcomings emerging under the Cuban system–are the partial failure of Marxian state monopoly ownership socialism.
The Cuban experience teaches us in the US/Canada/Mexico, as well as other countries, how NOT to construct socialism.
Cuba does not need regime change. It needs the socialist party in power to embrace the new hypothesis of modern cooperative, state co-ownership, for the further experiment in socialism.
This would re-institute private productive property rights, reinvigorate the Cuban economy, and bring about a rapid solution to the deterioration of the housing and building stock.
Nothing demonstrates the utter failure of Revolution like the crumbling buildings of Havana. 54 years of parasitical socialism has destroyed the beauty and wealth of the Cuban capital city.
As a sincere and long term transformationary socialist in the US, I am appalled that this can have happened to the Cuban revolution. If anyone in the world still has faith in the Marxian principle of state monopoly ownership, I can only shake my head.
This does not mean that socialist post-monopoly-capitalism has been disproved. It does mean that the abolition of the institution of private property rights is not a workable basis for socialism. Private productive property–including farms, buildings and housing–must become the direct property of those who use it.
That is, ownership must be private and “democratized,” not held exclusively by the socialist state. In light of the Cuban experiment, it’s almost a “no-brainer.”
I read somewhere that there is an average of one housing structure collapse every day in Havana causing dislocations and even deaths. Maybe more as some of these collapses are internal to the structure and not officially reported as the occupants do not want to be evacuated to the worse conditions of the shelters the Castros have set up. Cuban housing experts claim the housing deficit is closer to 1 million when asked off the record. Already, 3 and 4 generations living under the same roof are common in the cities. The only solution is outside capital infusion to repair existing and build new housing but without reforms and real anti-corruption efforts, this is unlikely. Even the new ultra-luxurious golf resort homes intended mainly for foreigners has been riddled with delays due to corruption scandals and bureaucratic obstacles. Regime change can not come too soon in the fight for adequate housing for Cubans.
For those interested in all matteres related to housing in Cuba see:
“Vivienda en Cuba
Cuba need lacks adequate housing for it’s people. Over 500,000 houses need extensive repairs and lots more need to be built. Houses could only be “exchanged” until recently. Now they can be sold. Often houses are impounded for “infractions”. People that leave the country illegally lose their property rights. This site highlights the plight of Cubans. La vivienda: problema Cubana”
http://housingcuba.blogspot.ca/