Two repurposed shipping containers now stand as homes in Havana’s historic center, the first fruits of a modular construction program that Cuba’s leadership hopes will begin to relieve a deepening shelter emergency. The homes, unveiled Saturday with President Miguel Díaz-Canel in attendance, went to two single mothers: one had spent more than a dozen years in a shelter, the other lived in a single room with two teenagers, state media reported.
The pair of container homes was built in roughly one month using surplus materials from tourism investment projects, technologies developed by Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, and containers that had imported parts from China for solar panel farms. The project is an early marker for a program designed to counter what Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz called a housing deficit exceeding 800,000 homes, concentrated most acutely in the capital.
A 2020 government survey found that Cuba, an island of nearly 10 million people, holds 3.9 million homes, with roughly 40% rated as only fair or poor. Years of economic contraction, scant maintenance, and recurring hurricanes have left whole neighborhoods of century-old buildings on the brink. In Havana’s once-elegant colonial core, residents live with daily collapse risks. “Everybody here in Havana lives in fear,” said Yurieska Artunet Martí, a 29-year-old beautician who is four months pregnant.
Artunet Martí shares a deteriorating apartment with her three children, ages 7 months, 1, and 5. Plaster from the ceiling rains onto their bed at night. She was forced to close the salon she ran from the apartment, she said, because clients stopped coming — the route into the building required navigating eroded steps, splintered wood, and a gaping elevator shaft. Unable to afford a move, she remains in a section of the building that is still standing, but only just. “We know we’re in danger, but we have to accept reality,” she said.
A few blocks away, 60-year-old engineer Carlos Sablón recalled a nighttime collapse on his building’s third floor. “It’s quite damaged by time,” he said, looking from his second-story window onto a crumbling courtyard. Firefighters evacuated the structure after the collapse, but Sablón and a handful of other residents returned after determining his apartment was still livable. He hooked up electricity and water for himself and those who stayed. “You’re always going to be afraid,” he said, adding that no authority ensures residential safety. “This is the one I fear the most. I hope it’s not when someone is walking by.”
Further into the old quarter, 63-year-old Magalys Caro lives confined to a single room, a makeshift kitchen, and a bathroom after her former home disintegrated during a hurricane. The building where she now resides has a collapsed rear section visible from her quarters. “Nothing gets resolved. The Housing Department does nothing,” she said of the decade she has spent in those conditions.
At Saturday’s event, Prime Minister Marrero Cruz said the modular-home effort could be sped up. “It is not moving at the desired pace,” he said, while insisting that work is underway. Delilah Díaz Fernández, housing director general at the Ministry of Construction, said more than 2,000 containers have been approved for conversion and roughly 700 are currently being fabricated into homes. The primary beneficiaries, she said, will be people displaced by extreme weather or structural failures.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.