Open the windows, sweep, water the plants: faced with the massive emigration that has affected Cuba for three years, many inhabitants of the island have become, despite themselves, the guardians of the countless homes left empty by relatives or neighbors.
Once a week, Alfredo Garcia, 58, works in the apartment given to him by a neighbor who moved to Spain six months ago with her family. To avoid theft, she asked him to leave a few lights on and give the home a semblance of life.
In solidarity, Alfredo Garcia crosses the street and accomplishes his task every week. The building, located in a rather affluent neighborhood in western Havana, only has two apartments occupied out of four. Around his house, other neighbors have left.
“I’m the only one who stayed, all my friends on this block have emigrated,” the fifty-year-old who has lived in the neighborhood since he was a child told AFP.
The fear of endangering the properties in her care pushes a 72-year-old Havana retiree to request anonymity to tell AFP that she has to take care of the apartments of her brother, her sister-in-law and of his cousin, all three of whom emigrated to the United States within two years.
She also has to keep an eye on her daughter who has been living in Spain for seven years.
“We open them and spend one or two days in each one” once a month, explains the septuagenarian who lives in eastern Havana and pays everyone’s bills to make it appear that the owners are temporarily absent.
The deep economic crisis that has hit the communist island for four years, with power cuts, shortages of food, fuel and medicine, has caused a wave of emigration unprecedented since the Castro Revolution of 1959.
Cuba, which still officially had 11.1 million inhabitants before the pandemic, now has less than 10 million, according to the authorities, who have not organized a census since 2012.
Between January 2022 and August 2024, more than 700,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States on a regular or irregular basis, not counting the flows of migrants towards Latin America and Europe, for which there are no official figures. global.
– “Gift” –
This situation depressed Cuba’s real estate market, which emerged in 2011 when residents were allowed to buy or sell their homes. Previously, they could only trade them.
The brief thaw between Havana and Washington under the mandate of Democratic President Barack Obama (2009-2017) then gave a boost to the sector, notably with real estate investments in tourism.
“The multi-systemic crisis and the migratory wave have caused the real estate market to collapse,” writes Emilio Morales, a Cuban economist based in Miami, in an article by the consulting firm Havana Consulting Group, published in mid-2024.
Raidel Gonzalez, a 34-year-old driver, also dreams of emigrating. “I want to go with my family” to Mexico, he said, contacted by AFP by telephone via an announcement posted on a Facebook page dedicated to real estate transactions.
He put his five-room house up for sale seven months ago and has already had to lower the sale price by $10,000.
“The problem is that people almost give away their house to have money to leave,” another owner who does not want to give her name and is selling her apartment in the working-class Cerro neighborhood tells AFP. .
Some advertisements are particularly explicit: “For sale with everything inside”, “As soon as you have purchased it, you are moving in”, it is written in reference to owners who leave furniture and household appliances on site.
In an attempt to maintain a connection with the growing number of Cubans living abroad, the country passed a law in July that guarantees them to remain owners of their homes, regardless of the length of their stay outside the country. Until then, they lost ownership if they lived abroad for more than two years without returning to the island.
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