Found on Calle Virtudes, just steps away from the Hospital Hermanos Almejeira, my family’s home began to collapse under the weight of so many decades of neglect. It was not their fault. For three decades, Communist laws had criminalized the ability of citizens to repair their own homes without the authorization and rationing hand of the state. By the time it became legal to do so, in 1994, few Cubans possessed the wealth necessary to obtain the most basic material they had always needed to rebuild their homes: cement. Now it was money that one required to buy it; before political connections were essential. Yet “the owner” and distributor of cement remained the same: the Cuban state. With the help of a friend abroad and in the hopes of preserving the house whose ceiling and façade were at the verge of collapse, my auntie had sold the last thing of value her family possessed: a pair of diamond and gold earrings that our great aunt had received from her godfather, Francisco del Valle, the socially ostracized, gay and once extremely wealthy owner of the Palacio del Valle in Cienfuegos. The money did not prove great enough. After Raúl Castro legalized the selling of real estate in 2011 for the first time since 1961, the house was sold to a family of Cubans who left in the 1990s, made a small fortune in Spain and returned as investors, interested in setting up an Airbnb in Havana. Centro Habana, October 2012.
