Housing is intimately intertwined with many of the complexities of everyday life in urban Havana. While Cuba’s housing situation has changed significantly during the post-Soviet period, it is tightly rooted in more long-term continuities. Housing forms a particular focus in many locals’ material efforts and exemplifies the ways in which social relations are entangled with material issues.
The lack of adequate housing has been a constant problem in Havana
throughout the revolution (and even before; see Butterworth 1980; Trefftz 2011;
Hamilton 2012: 218-229). In 1960, the Urban Reform Law (Reforma Urbana) gave renters the right to ownership or life-time usufruct right of their residences for a very small fee (Trefftz 2011; see also Eckstein 1994: 155). However, Cuba constructs very few new housing units and in the absence of construction material, the old ones are falling apart. Until the law reform in 2011 (Cave 2011), individuals were not legally allowed to buy, sell, or rent housing units.11 There were only two legal ways to a new place to stay: gain access to a work brigade that co-builds houses for its members or exchange a residence that one already owns with someone else in a permuta swap. However, despite these strict state regulations, I was told a certain form of housing ‘speculation’ was possible also before the most recent law change if one was smart and lucky enough to make advantageous swaps. In this practice, what mattered was social relations rather than money.
At the time of my fieldwork, Cubans were not officially allowed to buy land and access to construction materials was highly restricted. The only way to construct one’s own house officially was to receive land from the state for instance as a reward for services rendered abroad (e.g. soldiers, physicians, athletes) or as a compensation (e.g. to the widow of a soldier who had died in battle) and then achieve the authorisation to purchase construction materials in state shops for a subsidised price. However, housing units, land, and construction materials were also sold and bought through black market deals. The problem with such contracts was that since they were illegal, there was a real danger of being cheated: there was no way to make sure that the person who claims to sell something really is the legal owner of it. Moreover, such deals required constant monetary contributions to state officials so that there would be no problems with the inspectors. Besides, it was actually more
11 The housing market was liberalised in November 2011, allowing Cubans to buy and sell their flats and own a second home outside of the cities (Cave 2011; Burnett 2012).
expensive to purchase construction materials through unlicensed channels.
Throughout my fieldwork, some of my closest informants have been engaged in very complicated procedures in order to gain legal ownership of their residence. In some case, these cases have been going on for several years, which demonstrates that housing forms a specific focus of people’s efforts and aspirations.
Before the law reform in 2011, marriage deals represented a way to circumvent state regulations because legal marriage granted a way to include the spouse into the legal ownership of the housing unit.12 Contracting a legal marriage was a way to close a deal on a house without complications, even though in practice the two partners would usually live in different addresses. My ethnographic data suggests that housing, love, and sexuality interweave in other ways as well. A man or a woman with access to adequate housing easily attracts plenty of suitors and admirers, as many people are eager to find a way to move out from their crowded family flats. A person living alone and in possession of a decent home may quickly receive marriage proposals in a relationship and many of my flat-owning research participants explicitly rejected legal marriage in order to prevent their partner from gaining legal rights of ownership to their residence. However, even in the absence of legal marriage, love and sexual relations have for a long time been a way to circumvent state regulations and to negotiate Havana’s housing crisis as well as Cubans’ desires of migration (see also Hamilton 2012: 224).
Although such processes are importantly gendered, my ethnographic data suggests that there is little overall gender difference regarding legal house ownership (although this often transforms over the life cycle). Amongst the 55 legal home owners, 28 were women, 27 men.13
Relatively often, people circulate between different households. A person may consider distinct residences home and divide his/her time and possessions between them. Moreover, some people live circulating constantly between their kin’s and partners’ households without any stable home (but they are not homeless).14 Men, women, and children may all circulate between households,
12 Since the reform of the Family Law (Código de Familia) in 1975, “singular and stable” consensual unions occupy the same legal status as legal marriages (capítulo I, sección tercera, artículo 18). (The law does not specify how long a union needs to be in order to be considered stable.) The law states that spouses share property but cites so many exceptions to the rule that in practice marriage does not automatically give right to the spouse’s possessions (capítulo II, sección segunda, artículos 31-33). However, my informants were under the impression that legal marriage gives both partners the right of ownership to a flat previously owned by one of the partners and this guided their views about commitments.
13However, in el barriecito, one of the two neighbourhoods where I worked, there was a minor gender difference: in my street there were more male land and house owners than women. This is explained by the fact that this is a military area and men are more likely to pursue military careers (for a long time, women were not even allowed to do so) and to gain housing through this means, whereas women are more likely to receive housing as inheritance.
14 This is typical also for other parts of the Caribbean; see Clarke 1974: 107-108, Smith 1974: iv; Barrow 1996: 249;
Gonzalez 1996 [1984]: 149-159.
although men tend to change households more often than women. Starting and ending a sexual relationship explained most of this mobility among my research participants.
When a relationship starts, depending on which of the partners has access to housing, either a woman may move in with a man or a man may move in with a woman. (If both partners have access to housing, it is more likely for a woman to move in with the man than vice versa.) If the couple separates, depending on who owns the flat, either the man or the woman may move out, to reside either with a new partner or with kin. In many cases, if the couple has children, the man moves out to reside with a new partner even if he owns the flat, since children usually follow their mother. However, at all ages, boys tend to live with their father more often than girls. Women are usually very reluctant to leave girl children to reside with anyone else, but they may sometimes leave a boy child to be raised by his father or patrilateral kin (an aunt or a grandmother). The reason for this may be a move to another province (or country) because of a new partner or the fact that a woman’s new partner does not want to have her children from a previous union living in his house;
especially the relationship between a woman’s son and her partner easily becomes conflicting.
However, not all couples live together. While it was not seen as good for anyone to live alone, some women with a residence of their own did not want their partner to live with them and preferred to maintain a dating relationship. In a couple, there are expectations of gendered reciprocity in the performance of everyday tasks, which are divided into men’s and women’s work. Women typically perform the most of the work that takes place inside the house while men take care of several outside chores (such as going to the market to buy food, cleaning the yard, or fixing a broken antenna). Some women rejected the additional domestic chores that having a man in the house would entail.
However, while men perform many tasks for their partner as well, they usually do this even if they don’t live with the woman. On the other hand, men often need to live with a woman in order to get their housework done.
These practices connect with a wider Caribbean notion of the gendering of space between the house and the street, pointed out by Peter Wilson (1976) in his classical ethnography on Providence. While this does not mean that women would not leave the house or that men would not spend time inside the house, there is a pervasive gendered orientation to space that makes la casa a symbolically female area and la calle a symbolically male area (see also Rosendahl 1997: 58-61; Pertierra 2008 on the house; Lundgren 2011: 96-118 on the street). Similarly, both of these spaces contain a degree of moral danger
to the other gender. While in practice many habanera women tend to be free to roam the streets as much as they like already at an early age, the description
“a woman of the street” (una mujer de la calle or callejera) easily contains moral frowning. For a man, the accusation of spending too much time at home is more serious because it questions his masculinity. Therefore, boys are pushed out to the street from an early age (Rosendahl 1997: 62-63).
This gendered orientation of space also connects with notions of control and assertiveness in a relationship. Even though both men and women supervise their partner’s movements to a certain degree, men are expected to do their best to avoid female control (Lundgren 2011: 51-61) while at the same time maintaining control over their female partners, both supervising and protecting them. Living with his partner gives a man more control over a woman’s movements and amongst my research participants, many men wanted to be on the current of their partner’s whereabouts at all times. Women, on the other hand, often preferred maintaining a degree of independence in their relationships (for instance, by hanging on to their own home even when moving in with a man to his home). Men easily find such displays of a woman’s independence threatening and want their partner to depend on them in some way (see also Lundgren 2011: 51-61, 65-66). Moreover, a man needs to live with a partner in order to avoid doubts about his masculinity and suspicions of being homosexual, whereas for a woman living alone does not pose a similar threat to her femininity (although she may at times receive frowning comments from kin and neighbours).
Such practices show that space and housing carry importantly gendered and sexualised meanings. Similar meanings relate to the human body.