Cuba passes law allowing private home sales

HAVANA, Nov 4 (AFP): The Castro government has allowed individuals to buy and sell homes for the first time in 50 years, bringing relief to Cubans celebrating the latest reforms of the island's Soviet-style economy. "It's about time," said Aida Iglesias at the informal street market in Paseo del Prado where Cubans go to swap houses or apartments, until now the main method for acquiring a new home. "Now anybody can buy or sell a house without problems." Published last Thursday in the official gazette, the new law applies to Cuban citizens and permanent residents and allows sales, donations and exchanges between private parties. The reform goes into effect November 10 with the goal of "contributing to the solution of the housing problem" and "guaranteeing the effective exercise of the rights of owners." The measure is part of a series of economic reforms aimed at reviving the economy of the communist-ruled island and easing a severe housing shortage. President Raul Castro has begun the process of reorganising a system in which 85 per cent of the country's five million workers are employed by the state. The private sector expansion was the main plank in reform plans endorsed at the sixth congress of the Communist Party, in an effort to restructure a Soviet-style economic model and revive a stagnant economy while stopping short of creating a market-led system. "I think anything that recognises private property is a step forward," said opposition economist Oscar Espinosa, who spent a year in prison after a major crackdown on dissent in 2003. "This is going to create a whole movement in Cuba in a positive sense, reactivating construction activity, which in turn will give (the economy) more movement," he told the news agency. Nearly 80 per cent of Cubans own their residences but until now the only transactions available were under a complex system of informal exchanges. At the same time, the country is believed to have a deficit of around a million homes, with the situation made worse by a shortage of building materials and hurricane damage in recent years. Three years ago, the government acknowledged that its national housing construction and maintenance programme was meeting only five to seven percent of the population's needs. In the absence of authorised home sales, a vast underground economy had grown in which large sums of money changed hands. Under that system, a young couple seeking more space would have to pay several thousand dollars off the books to take over a pensioner's four-room residence in central Havana.