The National Assembly of People's Power approved on July 30, 2026, the , a regulation that clearly establishes that the registration of a domicile at a given address does not generate property rights over the occupied dwelling nor grants occupancy rights without the consent of the property owner.
The text was published in the on August 14, after being unanimously adopted in a regular vote during the Seventh Ordinary Period of Sessions of the X Legislature.
The approval was formalized through the Agreement X-180, signed by Juan Esteban Lazo Hernández, president of the National Assembly, and establishes that the law must be ratified by the President of the Republic before coming into full effect.
One of the central points of the rule is the distinction between residence and ownership, an issue that has historically caused confusion in Cuba.
According to the approved text, the domicile is "a legal-administrative attribute, not a title of ownership or a mechanism for turning residence into property rights over the housing."
Each Cuban citizen or foreign resident may only have one registered address and is obligated to keep it updated with the competent authority, which will be affiliated with the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), specifically with the Directorate of Identification, Migration, Immigration, and Citizenship.
The law also creates a unique, permanent, and non-repeating identifier for each person, and incorporates a digital identity for electronic procedures.
The biometric data associated with identification will include photographs, fingerprints, voice, iris, skin color, eye color, and height.
The regulation also establishes a sanctioning regime with offenses classified as minor, serious, and very serious.
Law 188 replaces Decree-Law 248 of 2007, which until now regulated the identification system and the registration of residences in Cuba.
The report was presented by the Constitutional and Legal Affairs and National Defense and Internal Order Committees of the National Assembly, as recorded in Agreement X-180.
Before its approval, the project sparked public debate: Cuban emigrants expressed concerns about whether they could maintain a registered address in Cuba while living abroad, a worry that the text aims to address by providing for Cuban consular offices to process applications for the Personal Identity and Address Registry for citizens overseas.
The rights organization Cubalex warned that the concentration of identity, biometrics, and address in a single state system managed by MININT could turn into a "surveillance infrastructure disguised as a civil procedure," noting the lack of sufficient guarantees to limit the use of the collected data.
La Gaceta No. 67 includes a total of 17 regulations approved during the same legislative session on July 30, among them Law 187 "On Housing" and Law 189 "Labor Code."
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