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While Cuba accumulates an official deficit of over 929,000 homes and 35% of the housing stock is in fair or poor condition, the regime is celebrating an academic innovation event for the construction industry this Wednesday in Holguín.
According to the state agency ACN, the University of Holguín (UHo) and the Construction Materials Company (Médano) launched the Circular CreLab 2026 Hackathon, a three-day competition aimed at generating technological and sustainable solutions for the sector.
The event brings together 10 multidisciplinary teams randomly formed by students from Civil, Mechanical, Industrial, and Computer Engineering.
Marisol Pérez Campaña, Vice-Rector for Strategic Management at UHo, explained that "the competition aims to promote the circular economy and optimize the supply chain through the participation of young students in engineering programs."
Yudelkis Salcedo Fernández, technical and development director of Médano, specified that the challenges to be addressed include "the reduction, reuse, and recovery of waste; the improvement of internal and external logistics, and proposals to decrease energy consumption in production processes."
The hackathon is part of the international project InnoLabs, co-financed by the European Union through the Erasmus+ program, operating until January 2028.
In Cuba, the project is represented by the Technological University of Havana (Cujae), the University of Cienfuegos, and UHo.
The winning solutions will receive membership in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Laboratory of the Holguin institution and will serve as a scientific foundation for the provincial industry.
The contrast with the housing reality in the country is hard to ignore. In 2025, Cuba only completed 22% of its annual construction plan: 2,382 homes out of the 10,795 planned.
The housing crisis has deepened steadily, with cement plants that have been without significant maintenance for more than seven years, operating at 10% of their installed capacity, against a national demand of four million tons per year.
In the informal market, a bag of cement can cost 7,000 Cuban pesos (about 14 dollars), and 400 bricks are sold for 41 dollars. More than 30,000 families still live in dirt floors, according to official data published in Granma.
The Isla de la Juventud completed only 39 homes in all of 2025, the worst performance in the country.
In June 2026, the National Assembly approved a new Housing Law that repeals the 1988 regulation and introduces mortgage financing and subletting for the first time.
The regulation also limits ownership to two permanent homes per person and empowers the State to reclaim properties that are abandoned and in structural disrepair. Analysts, however, point out that the law does not address the underlying issue: the lack of materials, bureaucracy, and state control that has paralyzed construction for decades.
The hackathon has real academic value, but its impact is marginal in the face of a structural crisis that the regime has been unable —or unwilling— to resolve for years using the tools that are truly needed: investment, decentralization, and openness to the private sector in construction.
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