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The Cuban writer Joaquín Baquero, the first biographer of the dancer Alicia Alonso and the author of several books, was reportedly a victim of a forced takeover of his apartment in the Náutico neighborhood, Playa municipality, Havana, according to the public complaint by ICAIC art director Luis Lacosta.
Baquero, a man over 70 years old, blind and disabled, arrived at his home—where he has lived for decades—and found that the property had been violated, with the locks changed. Lacosta explained that the action was carried out on the orders of a citizen who has been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years and claims to have rights to the property.
"Today, the writer Joaquín Baquero, with several books published in Germany, a man over 70 years old, blind and disabled, arrived at his apartment in the Náutico neighborhood where he has lived for many years, only to find that his home had been violated; the lock had been changed by a citizen who has lived in the United States for over 20 years, claiming he had the right to it," Lacosta wrote on his Facebook profile.
The complainant did not hide his outrage and warned: "We must be very careful, and now more than ever, we need the support of our laws."
The case was amplified by the journalist and political analyst José Manuel González Rubines, who described it as a "serious issue" and framed it as a symptom of a structural problem affecting hundreds of families in Cuba.
"Beyond the details of the case and the individuals involved, the situation is repeated by the hundreds in Cuba, where the regime stripped thousands of people of their properties who left the country over the decades. My own family experienced this. Even photos, cutlery, and decorations were taken," wrote González Rubines in his Facebook post.
The analyst noted, however, that the solution is not straightforward, as most of those who occupied the homes redistributed by the regime "were not individuals connected to power, but rather low-income families," and that many current occupants are no longer the original beneficiaries of the distribution, but people who acquired the properties through purchase or exchange, "often at the expense of a lifetime of savings."
The question posed by González Rubines is a difficult one to answer: "How can we compensate those who were dispossessed by an unjust act of the regime without turning into victims those who currently occupy those homes without any responsibility for that? And how can we indemnify either group if the Cuban state does not have (and will not have, at least in the short term) the resources to do so?"
The legal origin of this entanglement dates back to the early years of the dictatorship. The Urban Reform Law of October 14, 1960 reorganized urban property and abolished lease contracts. However, the regulation that sealed the dispossession was Law No. 989 of December 5, 1961, which mandated the nationalization through confiscation—without compensation—of all properties belonging to those who permanently left Cuba.
Decades later, the accumulated problem is colossal. There are at least 5,913 claims certified by the U.S. government before the Foreign Claims Commission, with an estimated value exceeding $9 billion with interest, plus an additional 200,000 to 300,000 claims from Cuban-Americans who were Cuban nationals when the expropriations occurred.
The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, whose Title III was fully activated in 2019, allows for lawsuits against companies that operate with confiscated properties in Cuba.
Experts in heritage recoveries have dismissed, however, the possibility of massive evictions in a potential Cuban transition, pointing to compensations and negotiated solutions as the most viable approach. However, the Baquero case shows that some claimants may be acting unilaterally and extrajudicially, taking possession of occupied homes without waiting for any legal process.
González Rubines did not shy away from the seriousness of the situation: "This is one of the many issues that the regime has left us as a ticking time bomb. Another task, complicated like the others, to address during the transition."
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