Cuban migrants and the making of Havana's property market (original) (raw)

Cuban Migrants and the Making of Havana\u27s Property Market

2020

The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the Global South . With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the transnational real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba\u27s cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into privat...

Tourism-led housing commodification: Transnational real estate networks and state-permeated property investment in Havana, Cuba

Tourism-led housing commodification: Transnational real estate networks and state-permeated property investment in Havana, Cuba, 2024

In a context of ever-growing demand for tourism property, this paper scrutinizes emerging forms of tourism-led housing commodification in Havana, Cuba. In 2011, the Cuban property market reopened to investment when the socialist government allowed the sale of private property at prices set in a market environment. We pay attention to the critical role of Cuban migrants, remittance investors and lifestyle elites in commodifying Havana's historic housing stock and transforming residential property into short-term rentals, hotels, private restaurants and tourist boutiques. We demonstrate how the Cuban government has become an active market facilitator, either by restraining private competition or by encapsulating tourism property investment within broader channels of the state. We conclude that the case of Havana is indicative of broader trends in tourism and hospitality, particularly in the Global South and East. We propose tourism-led housing commodification as a conceptual framework for understanding these broader commonalities.

Commodifying Havana? Private accumulation, assetisation and marketisation in the Cuban metropolis

Urban Studies, 2023

In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressures of international capital markets. Therefore, it is sometimes hypothesized that financial innovations created in the Global North are moving 'South.' However, even though transnational capital is finding its ways into southern regions and other areas of reform, the road towards urban commodification is bumpy and uneven. In Havana, Cuba, the government recently legalized free market home sales, contributing to an unprecedented transnational property boom where many homes were acquired by Cuban émigrés and nationals and converted into restaurants, hotels or short-term rentals. Nevertheless, due to endogenous and exogenous market restraints, the pandemic and complex interactions between state authorities and property-owning private entrepreneurs, Cuban-style commodification remains an incomplete and contested process. Even so, non-debt bearing assetization pressures are clearly redefining Havana's socialist property market. While the State encourages foreign direct investment into state-owned hotels and joint ventures, transnational remittances contribute to the commodification of Havana's private housing stock.

HAVANA'S TRANSNATIONAL GENTRIFICATION: HIGHEST AND BEST USE FROM ELSEWHERE

TESG, 2023

This article addresses the two processes of market making and transnationalization in Havana through the lens of gentrification theory. Using a case study situated between Global South and East, this article looks more closely at transnational families and migrants as agents of gentrification in Havana, analysing how they create and exploit the rent-gap. Returning to the central ideas of ‘highest and best use’ and ‘circulations’ in N. Smith's rent-gap theory, I analyse how increased transnational mobility has affected the commodification and potential use of housing in Havana. Based on interviews with transnational owners who purchased housing to upgrade and convert into an Airbnb, this article shows how the “highest and best use” of a property is evaluated from elsewhere. It also demonstrates the complexities of transnational gentrification in a southern socialist city and insists on the need to understand more broadly the gentrification–migration nexus.

The Real Estate Market and Land Rental in Cuba: an Analysis of the Property Market in Havana, 2013-2019

2021

In 2011, a series of measures were adopted in Cuba aiming to update Cuban socialism.<br> Among them was the return of the real estate market after sixty years of its prohibition. In capitalist socie􀆟 es, the commodification of housing is related to urban ground<br> rent and its social effects, such as price specula􀆟 on and spa􀆟 al segregations. Therefore,<br> the restoration of the real estate market may bring back those phenomena to Cuba, despite<br> the measures and legislation on created to avoid it.

Cuba-US Relational Field From a Binational to a Transnational Urban Perspective

CUBA FACING FORWARD BALANCING IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2018

New mobility and transnational ties between Cuba and the US are explored in order to understand how today the Cuban capital is changing. By looking at the evolution of connectivity between territories we also have a look on the real estate market in the touristic central districts underlining the links between the investments coming from Miami, the tourism development and the formation of a real estate market.

Real Estate in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean

2020

The aim of the present volume is to consider the region's strength and opportunities in real estate and urban development that can contribute to a positive change to provide healthy lifestyles and cities. Following the publication of Real Estate and Development in South America (Murray, Monetti and Ween, 2018), the present volume completes the regional analysis by following a similar structure in terms of selecting best economies for real estate development. However, if the previous volume was concerned with sustainability of the markets and urban development, this book has a focus on the resilience of markets and development, i.e. how a region that is heavily reliant on tourism and logistics copes with the devastating effects that climate change and other catastrophes can have on man-made infrastructure.

Back to Little Havana: Controlling Gentrification in the Heart of Cuban Miami

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2014

In this article we examine the nature and implementation of governing strategies to control the gentrification of Little Havana, the symbolic heart of Cuban Miami. We ask how Cuban-American power relations at the neighborhood level operate to “produce” the citizen best suited to fulfill and help reproduce policies and practices of “securing” in order to gentrify Little Havana. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Little Havana and Miami, our analysis reveals how governance operates through neighborhood-level intermediaries and interpersonal relations. We apply Foucault’s “pastoral power” to Miami's Cuban exile community in order to explain how the “Cuban-ness” and “Latin-ness” of governing relations and the personification of political power are crucial to socio-spatial control in Little Havana. Elites shape the conduct of individuals in order to achieve strategic goals in the name of community interest. Residents are key partners in the relational ensemble that governs and disciplines the neighborhood comprised mostly of low-income, Central American immigrants.