Reinvesting in Havana: Housing Commodification and Gentrification in the Central Neighbourhoods of a Socialist City in the Global South

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.13.2.0248
• Pages: 248-274
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Violaine Jolivet,Mateo Alba-Carmichael
• Subject Matter: housing,commodification,gentrification,digitalisation,post-socialist city

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 13.2 WInter 2021

ACADEMIC ARTICLE

REINVESTING IN HAVANA:

HOUSING COMMODIFICATION AND

GENTRIFICATION IN THE CENTRAL

NEIGHBOURHOODS OF A SOCIALIST CITY

IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Violaine Jolivet is an Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal. Her work in urban

and social geography focuses on the links between mobility and urban production in the

Americas. She is the author of a book Miami the Cuban, Geography of a Crossroad-City

between the Americas (published in French in 2015) and published several articles about

gentrification and urban revitalization policies in a critical perspective in Miami, Havana and

Montreal.

Mateo Alba-Carmichael is a geographer and cartographer from the University of Montreal.

Regarding Cuba, he has worked alongside Violaine Jolivet since 2017 for the project “(Re)investing

Havana”, mainly analysing and mapping data. He also worked as an intern for the Group for the

Integral Development of the Capital (GDIC) in Havana in 2020. His current interests include cities’

social and regional development, and macroeconomic degrowth.

Abstract

This article addresses the commodification of housing in Havana from 2011 onwards.

It argues that the theories of gentrification and rent-gap can illuminate aspects of

the transformation of the Cuban capital, even though these theories originated in

capitalist urban contexts and that in Cuba the state is responsible for determining

the value and ownership of land. The analysis of digital real estate ads on four

platforms between 2012 and 2020 allows us to estimate the price and location of

properties sold, their relationship to economic reinvestment in the central areas

of the city, and how the geographic factors that define centrality are increasingly

compromised by touristification and more generally by the commodification of

housing. The urban transformations studied in this initial article on the real estate

reInVeStInG In HaVana 249

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market and gentrification in the Cuban capital allow us to highlight that, on one

hand, the transformation of housing into a commodity demonstrates the erosion of

socialist values in urban production and, on the other, the creation of a real estate

market in Havana has reinforced the connection of the Cuban city with transnational

capitalist circulation. The article considers the economic and political context in which

the market develops, then explains the methodology of big-small data in a context

of limited access to information, followed by an analysis characterising Havana’s

market that examines the importance of spatial centrality and transnational flows

of people and capital.

Keywords: housing, commodification, gentrification, digitalisation, post-socialist city

In Cuba, since November 2011, Decree-Law 288 allows Cuban citizens to sell

and purchase houses on the island, respecting the limit that an individual can

only own two properties at a time (main and vacation), which has been in

place since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. This legal limit protects the

housing sector from uncontrolled economic liberalisation that would favour

some wealthy owners or investors (local or foreign) who, in most capitalist

or post-socialist markets, have been key players in the accumulation of real

estate and financialisation of the housing sector, particularly in recent decades

(Aalbers 2019). Now that Havana has a real estate market, it can be compared

to other emerging real estate markets, including those in (post-)socialist cities.1

In Cuba 85 percent of the population owns the property in which they live and

real estate speculation and mortgage credit were abolished early in the 1959

revolution (Trefftz 2011), so to reintroduce a real estate market and its socio-

economic mechanisms 50 years later turns this into a historic opportunity to

witness and analyse the broader economic and social changes taking place on

the island (Brenner etal. 2014; Pérez 2014; Pleyán 2020). The commodification

of housing is relevant to understanding the market-oriented transformations

on the island, as well as the acceleration of privatisation and liberalisation in

1 Although incomplete, this categorisation of cities in countries that have been or are

still governed by communist regimes designates a relationship between a specific spa-

tial entity: the city and its suburbs, and an ideological, political, economic and social

system: socialism. Some of the characteristics of socialist cities are a predominance

of public land and state-managed investment and reduced socio-spatial segregation

(French and Hamilton 1979; Szelenyi 1996; Hirt 2013).