Cuba built only 33% of its annual plan for new homes

The Cuban government reported that at the end of the first half of the year, 11,997 homes were built and received "habitable" status, which represents only 33% of the annual plan planned for 2022.

The General Directorate of Housing presented a report to the deputies in the Industry, Energy and Construction Commission on compliance with the plan until June 2022, where it recognized the delays.

"As of June, 11,997 homes were completed and received habitable status, 33% of the 36,831 planned in the annual plan. In the sixth month of the year, 2,032 were built," says the report, cited by the official media.Cubadebate.

It clarifies that of the 11,997 homes built in the first half of the year, only 4,789 were built by the state.

Of the rest, 5,613 were completed through the efforts of the population and 1,598 belong to basic housing cells (CBH), that is, completed with the help of subsidies.

The provinces that did not comply with the schedule were Havana, Mayabeque, Pinar del Río, Villa Clara, Matanzas,Las Tunas and Ciego de Ávila, said the state entity.

Regarding the homes destroyed by weather events, as of June, only 3,099 had been resolved, of the 10,523 planned for the year, which represents 38%. In provinces like Pinar del Río and Guantánamo there are families who have been waiting for more than a decade for their homes, which were destroyed by the hurricanes.

Recently, the government said that the housing plan in Cuba was seriously affected by the shortage of materials, so in some cities likeTrinidad, Camaguey and rural areas of Las Tunas had begun the construction of mud and wooden houses.

Guantánamo also faces acomplex crisis with almost 1,500 total collapses unsolved, the authorities recently acknowledged.

The official newspaperWe will win reported that there are in that territory1,472 landslides totals pending response, "more than 900 flats of land and 500 mothers with three or more children in vulnerable situations."

Likewise, in Sancti Spíritus, of a plan of 1,324 new homes planned for 2022, they have only managed to build 576, a fact that the local press describes as "significant delays" in fulfilling the plan planned for the current year.

However, the day before the governmentannounced a million-dollar investment to build, before 2030, golf courses, dolphinariums and other sites of interest for tourism.

In the first half of 2022, the Cuban government received only 682,411 foreign visitors, failing to comply with its own plan for the date, according to official data. Despite the poor results that tourism is having in Cuba, the government maintains its plan to receive some 2.5 million foreigners before the end of the year and continues investing in the tourism sector.

Economist Pedro Monreal said in this regard that given the evident contraction of tourist activity, the Cuban government should resume investment in basic service sectors such as electricity, water and gas, instead of continuing to allocate countless resources to real estate activity, specifically to the construction of hotels.

According to the specialist, the decision to invest in one sector or another is a political decision by the country's authorities, pressured by popular discontent exacerbated by frequent blackouts.

Monreal has warned in this regard that receiving 2.5 million international visitors in 2022 would "left over" just over half of Cuba's hotel rooms (69 tourists rotating per room in 2018 vs. 32 in 2022), so it would be prudent take a "pause" in hotel investment to attend to "other priorities."