• by Leonardo Padura
• Monday, November 14, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Law 288 recently passed by the Cuban government finally made it legal to buy and sell private real estate on the island, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

In this analysis, Padura writes that among the benefits this law will bring Cubans, one of the first to be felt will be the conversion of their titles to property into legally more substantial documents. Other possible benefits include a more rational distribution of places to live, better repair and maintenance of homes by their new owners, the possibility that the property of a person who dies or "leaves for good" can go to a relative or friend, and the ability to sell land or structures where new rooms could be built.

Laws that were originally intended to share the patrimony of the country with a wide spectrum of its citizens and prevent speculation and the concentration of wealth eventually became a labyrinth of rules and regulations with no grounding in reality and a source of personal enrichment for a merciless bureaucracy long dedicated to fattening itself by twisting the law and taking advantage of the needs of the people. I hope that the newly realist lookout of the government and the climate of change that pushed the promulgation of this new law reaches other sectors of Cuban life that are loudly calling for deep and radical transformation.

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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