CU real estate2

Washington Post Foreign Service - HAVANA - Surgeon Guillermo Oceguerra Fuste and his ophthalmologist wife divorced almost a year and a half ago. They both have new loves in their lives. But because of Cuba's acute housing shortage and socialist laws, they still share the same apartment. To find a new place to live, Oceguerra does what everyone here does. He sits for hours on a stone bench beneath the shady ficus trees of the Prado boulevard, hoping that someone will come along with two small apartments to swap for his big one. "This makes me feel awful," said Oceguerra, 49, who, after his long shifts in the operating room, has been coming to the informal housing swap meet here almost every day for the past 16 months. "It's so hard, you lose so much time. There should be a better way to solve this problem." Under Cuban law, only the government is allowed to buy and sell most property. Private sales are banned. The only way for homeowners to change homes is to find someone willing to swap, and then the government must approve. The government keeps a computerized clearinghouse of properties on the swapping block, but it's sadly out of date and incomplete. So every day, dozens of people wander down to a shady stretch of the Prado, a pedestrian walkway that stretches from Havana's famous Parque Central down to the sea. They sit with small signs or handwritten sheets describing their apartments. Some pass around a sweat-stained notebook that is the closest thing Havana has to a multiple listings service. People scribble a description of their apartment and wait for nibbles from potential swappers. Finding a match is tricky because the laws are filled with quicksand: Only apartments of roughly the same size can be traded. Several of Havana's best neighborhoods have populations "frozen" by law, so if a family of four wants to move in, four other people have to move out. People wait months or years to find a suitable swap, then government paperwork to approve it can take a year or more. Also, according to several people familiar with the swapping laws, if one party leaves Cuba illegally within four or five years of a swap, the government can reverse the deal, punishing even those who stay behind. Cuban government housing officials declined to comment. They said there were new government housing plans in the works, but they would not discuss the details. For Oceguerra, who earns $31 a month -- a handsome salary in a land where the average salary is about $10 a month -- the frustration is searing. He and his wife don't bring their new loves home out of deference to their 19-year-old daughter, who also lives there. So although they own their own home, life there is often like a stiff stage play, and they must pursue their new love lives elsewhere. "I am the owner, but I don't feel like I really own my own house; this is a huge social problem," Oceguerra said, passing a recent Monday morning wandering among the other swappers, his tired eyes and day's growth of beard testament to a long night of surgery. He is actually among the lucky ones in Cuba's chronically terrible housing market. His three-bedroom apartment is in one of Havana's nicest areas, the Villa Panamericana, on the coast just east of downtown Havana. It was given to his family by the government after his father, a pilot for the national airline, was killed in a crash. Oceguerra's place is so nice that a wealthy Cuban recently offered to buy it for $40,000 -- a phenomenal sum here. But that private sale would have been illegal, and Oceguerra said he doesn't want to break the law. Published reports say that last year alone, the government confiscated more than 1,400 housing units and levied more than $1.5 million in fines for illegal private sales and unauthorized private rentals, repairs or additions. Anyone who wants to repair or remodel a home -- say, to rent a seaside apartment to dollar-rich foreign tourists -- must prove that all building materials were purchased from the state. With black-market cement and bricks selling for a fraction of official prices, people often risk confiscation of their homes to fix falling-down walls. Shortly after its 1959 socialist revolution, President Fidel Castro's government promised every Cuban "decent housing." For years Cuba tried to keep that promise with construction of vast tracts of concrete apartment buildings in the style of its patron, the Soviet Union. But plans to build 100,000 new housing units a year died with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba's economy was in desperate shape during most of the 1990s and its housing stock crumbled. Fueled by a recent boom in tourism, the government said it built 45,000 housing units last year and hopes to build that many this year, but that's far short of what is needed. The government's own reports acknowledge that many of this nation's 11 million people live in substandard housing. And Cuba's standards are modest: A working toilet that doesn't leak, a fan and new paint on the walls are markers of relative comfort in many apartment buildings. Old Havana greets tourists with elegant cobbled squares surrounded by magnificent colonial architecture, its years of decay slowly yielding to multimillion-dollar restoration projects. But down the narrow streets in the working-class neighborhoods of central Havana, the bustling streets are filled with holes, and buildings are rotting. Many apartments within them are in drastic condition, with leaking pipes, unreliable electricity and water, and severe overcrowding. The swap meet is filled with unhappy stories. But for some of the participants, playing the swap game is just another aspect of being a good patriot. They note that homelessness is virtually nonexistent here. They say that Cuba has relatively little crime, high literacy and free health care. Most people own their own homes, however modest. Given all that, they say, waiting a couple of years to find a new apartment is a not a great sacrifice. "I don't think it's a big problem; Cubans have always had to struggle for what they want," said Miguel Angel Vargas, 36, who sat along the Prado with his pregnant wife and their toddler son. "As a Cuban, I know that I have some possibilities guaranteed and other things I have to struggle for," he said. "I think that's good. Because when you get a lot of things the easy way, you don't treasure them as much as things you had to fight for."