Saturday, November 5, 2011

Cuba to permit buying, selling of real estate


Cuba’s government has given Cubans the right to buy and sell their homes for the first time since the early days of the 1959 revolution in a long-awaited reform that creates a real estate market and promises to put money in people’s pockets.


The reform, published on Thursday in the government’s Official Gazette, is one of the most substantial undertaken by the president Raul Castro to liberalise the island’s Soviet-style command economy while maintaining the communist system.


Castro has promised the change for a while and Cubans have looked forward to it as a way of finally being able to cash in on the value of their homes, which for five decades could not be sold but were swapped through a legal subterfuge.


As word of the new rules spread, visions of big money danced in the eyes of Cubans who earn an average salary equivalent to $18 a month.


‘I could probably sell my house for $1,00,000. If I had that kind of money I could do a lot of things, include get out of here if my family wants to go,’ said teacher Isabela Menendez, who lives in a 19th century apartment in central Havana.


Cuba expert Phil Peters at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, said the move could have broad ramifications for the Cuban economy, where the cash-strapped government is encouraging the growth of self-employment as it slowly whittles a million jobs from its bloated payrolls.


‘The ability to sell houses means instant capital formation for Cuban families.


It becomes a source of


capital at the grassroots level,’ Peters said. ‘It is a big sign of the government letting go.’


The new law is likely to stimulate a new housing market and attract money from Cuban exiles for their family members to buy homes and pieces of property, either for the family or as a bet on Cuba’s future, experts said.


The government hopes it will lead to more housing construction, which is desperately needed to address a housing shortage that officials put at 6,00,000 units in the Caribbean island nation of 11 million people.


The Communist Party, Cuba’s only legal political party, approved the notion of property sales at a congress in April.


The new rules give people the right to buy and sell, swap, donate or pass their houses on to heirs. They can do the same with small pieces of land.


Source: newagebd.com/newspaper1


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