UN Habitat estimates that three billion people will lack adequate housing by 2030. Slum dwellers now make up nearly a quarter of the world’s urban population, heavily skewed towards poorer states. Deforestation, desertification, pandemic-inducing losses in biodiversity, land-grab displacement and tens of millions of forced evictions each year characterise a housing system dictated by the anarchy of capitalist accumulation.
Imperialism, development, displacement
The Centre for Applied Research found that ‘developing and emerging’ countries are net creditors to ‘developed’ countries, that is, North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Licit and illicit capital flows describe an imperialist economic relationship whereby surplus capital is exported to oppressed nations to exploit cheap energy, labour, land and weak regulation; $152 trillion has been drained from underdeveloped countries since 1960 via unequal exchange alone. Economic stagnation and imperialist subservience are enforced in exploited nations through unilateral coercion, economic warfare, or military intervention.
North American and Western European real estate, agribusiness, and mining MNCs sit atop this exploitative structure, scouting for cheap investment and exporting land speculation models, such as demand-side subsidies and microfinance, across Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. This predatory system restricts exploited nations in developing and protecting housing, compounding debt trap austerity imposed by International Finance Institutions (IFIs). Rather than a human right, housing is now the most valuable asset on Earth.
Displacement by conflict, development, or disaster are all underpinned by land commodification based on capitalist accumulation cycles. Housing-related rights to food, water, sanitation, health, education, privacy and life are snatched to enrich the bourgeoisie and upper sections of the working class in imperialist nations, and domestic comprador classes. 80% of the world’s 100 million displaced originate from exploited nations.
Socialist housing
With housing considered a right rather than a speculative asset, 20th century socialist states achieved high levels of tenure security, and low levels of rent, utility costs, and homelessness by the 1990s, with higher quality-of-life indicators than comparably developed capitalist nations (Cereseto & Waitzkin, 1986). States that then transitioned away from socially owned means of production soon experienced housing crises of affordability, access, supply and quality.
By contrasting two exploited states with comparable pasts that diverged in political economy in their post-colonial histories, with one becoming a self-determined, socialist, centrally-planned state breaking with imperialist subservience and the other continuing to be dominated by imperialism in a capitalist political economy, the outcomes of capitalist and socialist approaches to housing the masses in the Global South can be compared.
Contrasting paths: socialist Cuba and the Philippines
Pre-independence, Cuba and the Philippines were both ~$2,000/capita GDP, capitalist, market economies, underdeveloped by Spanish colonialism and then US imperialism into extremely unequal societies ruled by land-owning elites. Both countries exhibited extreme urban-rural and social economic inequities, mass poverty, and high prevalences of communicable disease through lack of access to health services and social rights. Both were cash-crop economies, heavily reliant on sugar exports on the US-dominated world capitalist market. Socio-cultural heritages of a multi-ethnic history, population composition and religious demography are also comparable, whilst the Philippines is within the top 11% of geographically similar countries to Cuba along parameters like climate, population density, hydrology, urbanisation rate, land availability, topography and vegetation (Country Similarity Index, 2021). Both have access to similar local materials and housing design needs amidst similar natural hazard exposure.
Both countries also share a history of class struggle and brutal repression. However, after driving out the US imperialists following the successful 1959 revolution, Cuba chose self-determined, centrally planned socialist development. Despite also producing revolutionary movements, the Philippines remained locked into neo-colonial subservience to US political and economic interests after 1946 independence. This divergence has yielded drastically different social conditions for the masses of each country: for Cuba, dignity and independence despite a genocidal imperialist US blockade of 61 years; for the Philippines mass inequality, poverty and subservience to foreign powers.
Historical similarities and contemporary divergence have naturally given rise to comparisons between the two countries, for example in health services and outcomes (de Brun & Elling, 1987; docwerkers, 2016), especially given Cuba’s exemplary achievements in this field. However, Cuba is 37% the land area of the more fragmented Philippines, with a population nearly ten times smaller, meaning that statistical comparisons between the two require triangulation against countries of comparable size, population and regions for robustness, where such data exists.
Tenure rights
Legislation in the Philippines serves capitalist land speculation. Idle land tax laws, the unenforced 1987 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, and so-called ‘tenure-protection’ laws drive uneven development, zoning, social segregation, income inequality, and the ghettoisation typical of Engels’ characterisation of the capitalist city. A century of water, mineral or forest land-grabs accompany a steep urban-rural socioeconomic divide and a ‘city-rush’, closely linked to capitalism’s need for cheap labour, producing slums in Manila, Navatos, Malabon, Caloocan and Paranaque that can be seen from space.
Weak land rights systems run by uncoordinated agencies have bred corruption, exploitation by multinational companies and tenure insecurity felt most by women. Manila had the highest year-on-year house price appreciation in Q3 2023 of any city globally, and regularly ranks amongst the top cities in this metric, so ‘slum upgrades’ are an excuse for private development and violent eviction, resulting 32 per 1,000 street homeless.
In contrast, Cuban street homelessness is statistically negligible: the 1960’s Urban Reform Law ratified tenure security by ending markets in residential property, whilst 1984’s and 1988’s respective Housing Laws no. 48 and 65 ratified the right to own the home in which tenants lived, producing over 28% higher home ownership than in the Philippines today, at 88%. Pre-revolution, over half the majority rural population was totally landless. Abolition of land and property tax and the outlawing of housing profiteering gave high tenure security to Cubans by the late 1980s.
Under the mortgage system, finance is typically secured against the home as collateral, allowing the lender to repossess it should payments fail. When finance is needed for buying a home in Cuba, it is considered a loan, not a mortgage, so non-payment is recouped from wages, not eviction.
The centrally planned Registro de la Propiedad coordinates equitable land tenure distribution, enhancing property rights for women. Proactive, homeless-monitoring social work supports mental health reintegration via Cuba’s high quality, freely accessible health service. Cuban laws, constitutions, decrees, norms and resolutions ratified the right to a home some 35 years before the UN’s similar 1996b clause, so slum upgrades are not profit opportunities, but democratic public consultations: 7,365 informal homes were safely converted and legalised in 2019. It is also illegal to remove informal settlements until relocation.
Despite similar urbanisation rates as the Philippines, reductions in urban-rural inequities and eradication of pre-revolution slums via mass housebuilding gives an average Cuban urban slum dweller percentage, corrected for regional disparities, of 5% since the millennium. This far outperforms 33% in the Philippines, likewise global and regional comparisons. 1 in 3 Manilans are slum dwellers, unchanged since 1987, whereas mass rural housing construction in the first post-revolution decade crucially insulated Havana from uncontrollable urbanisation.
Affordability
1971 income inequality in the Philippines surpassed pre-independence levels. By 1987, just 81 families controlled an MNC-dominated economy crippled by IMF structural adjustment. Today, ever-inflating land prices mean just 14% of new housing is deceptively dubbed ‘affordable’, and even then, is hugely backlogged. Meanwhile huge surpluses of expensive or non-residential units have accrued. For the poorest quartile, the cheapest housing costs up to 67% of income, varying with unstable markets. The poorest 70% of Filipino families cannot afford finance to access even the cheapest form of housing, which is termed ‘socialised’, whilst 2023 house prices in Manila were over 24 times higher than a family’s annual income, on average.
In contrast, Cuba’s maximum housing costs are fixed by constitution and law, at 4% and 10% of income for rental and ownership, respectively. Finance is subsidised by housing type, between 76-82% and up to 100% for vulnerable persons.
Construction
In the early years of the Cuban revolution, from 1959-62, 33 shantytowns were replaced with 4,700 new housing units. Another 6,000 were constructed in Havanan landscaped neighbourhoods by the National Institute of Savings & Housing (INAV). 116 variations provided locality-specific, well-ventilated dwellings with gardens and diverse family size spatial layouts.
However, former Cuban Prime Minister, Fidel Castro, identified in 1963 that industrialised scaling was needed to fulfil the 100,000 unit-per-year demand, establishing a technological partnership with the Soviet Union based around prefabricated, standardised, high-strength concrete panels. The ‘Sandino’ model, and other large-panel designs, replaced shanties and traditional bohios en masse. Despite inevitable design diversity reductions, standardised facades were still adapted for Cuba by the revolutionary government’s first scientific organisation, the Technical Research Department. Panel-thinning saved costs whilst cross-ventilated designs cooled Santiago units. Soviet-style micro-districts, an antithesis to capitalist spatial planning, were adapted for Cuban society, prioritising public transport, greenways, communal living and equitable proximity to social services.
Waning Soviet support and a tightened US blockade eventually caused maintenance issues in large-panel factories by 1977. To adapt, the microbrigade programme was re-developed. The state provided materials for self-building by trained locals, creating employment, social cohesion, and a low skill construction threshold, with quantitative, qualitative and gender inclusivity superiority over other Latin American self-help schemes. In contrast, the 1970s World Bank ‘Build Your Own Home’ scheme in the Philippines only served to proliferate slum growth.
Centrally planned governance, rather than one beholden to surplus capital investment, allowed Cuba to transition from INAV to prefabrication to self-help, adapting to meet human need.
Cuba’s decentralised participatory democracy enjoys strong engagement, which is reflected in housing decisions made by the government; the 1988 Integral Transformation Workshops of the Neighbourhoods, 1990s Municipal Initiative for Local Development, and democratic apportioning of new housing units have cultivated public ownership of housing resource for Cubans.
Cumulative housing deficit, stock and mean housebuilding rate, per 1,000 people, are 60-70% better in Cuba than in the Philippines. When compared against the mean housebuilding rate of ‘compliance’ units, the umbrella term for ‘affordable’ housing in the Philippines, which of course is not affordable in any case, the contrast is even more damning.
Quality
Cuba’s construction agility mitigates overcrowding, with mean household size between 69-82% of nearest neighbours and the Philippines, whilst the number of households made up of six or more people was reduced by a factor of 5 since the millennium.
The MPI housing index, considering roof, wall and floor adequacy, is 15 times better in Cuba than in the Philippines, and at least an order better than nearest neighbours. Cuba’s centrally planned, multi-sectoral health approach reduced dirt floor prevalence from 63% in 1960 to 3% in 2018. Cement floor upgrades halve diarrhoea prevalence, triple the rate of cognitive development and lower stress and depression rates.
Housing-related access to cooking fuel, sanitation, water, electricity and household items fare similarly; just 0.2% are cooking fuel deprived in Cuba compared with 5%, 2%, and 41% in the Philippines, Dominican Republic and Haiti, respectively. Clean cooking fuel reduces cardiopulmonary risks by over 60% within 5 years.
Just 9% had bathrooms or sanitary latrines in 1959, but Cubans now enjoy 92% full coverage, owing to mass extensions of water and energy infrastructure through state programmes like the Turquino Plan. 6 million Filipinos openly defecate despite numerous well-being policies, owing to 1980s IFI structural adjustment. Water Aid, in 2015, demonstrated that market economies skew quality-of-life outcomes towards privileged layers of society, reflecting in policy ineffectiveness for the masses, which explains the increase in excrement disposal service inequality in the Philippines since independence, rather than the corresponding decrease seen in Cuba, despite its 14-year head start.
Cuban housing stock in ‘good’ condition increased from 8% in 1958 to 63% in 2020 while units in ‘fair’ or ‘bad’ condition reduced correspondingly.
However, blockade trade restrictions force Cuba to purchase sanitary furniture, asphalt blankets, hydro-sanitary embedment, additive production material, electrical materials, clay and false ceilings from distant markets, if even available outside North America. This delayed the renovation of 23,827 homes in 2022, slowing transfers from temporary shelters to homes.
In 2020, three schoolgirls were crushed to death beneath a collapsing balcony in the Jesús María neighbourhood of Havana, one of many high-profile incidents in recent years. The dangerous nature of the crumbling housing stock, especially in Havana was an issue inherited by the revolutionary government, beginning in the 1930s. Due to a forced reliance on tourism, owing to an inability to diversify income sources as a result of the blockade, residential areas in Havana have been neglected, with Robert Vasquez, Director of the Investments of the National Housing Institute, highlighting scarcity of materials as the cause of an inefficient repair process. Blockade trade restrictions force Cuba to purchase sanitary furniture, asphalt blankets, hydro-sanitary embedment, additive production material, electrical materials, clay and false ceilings from distant markets, if even available outside North America. This delayed the renovation of 23,827 homes in 2022, slowing transfers from temporary shelters to homes.
In a bid to address repairs, Resolution 201/2023 was issued, allowing state enterprises, Cuban-capital companies, and higher organisations of business management to use the housing repair fund for their employees’ houses.
Disaster response and materials
Exploitative socioeconomic systems have poorer natural hazard detection, mitigation, and adaptability, with weaker urban planning, tenant protections, and infrastructure. Conformity to the Hyogo framework, the UN’s blueprint for climate and disaster risk reduction, is proven to be weakened by ‘stakeholder diversity’: capitalist disaster rehousing requires private investors be kept happy. Resultant ‘disaster-capitalism’ land-grabs and unsustainable rehousing cause loss of tenure in the Philippines and Haiti.
Cuba’s ‘stakeholders’ are its population. Rating lowest in aid dependency and disaster deaths against the Philippines, Dominican Republic and Haiti, centralised planning coordinates a multisectoral, national-to-local emergency network, prioritising education, ecomaterials, housing preparedness and resettlement, also yielding an efficient Coronavirus pandemic response.
Rather than submit to IMF austerity during Cuba’s ‘special period’ in 1991, when foreign trade collapsed with the socialist bloc, Cuba increased social security, wages and investment. Establishing Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de Estructuras y Materiales (CIDEM) built local capacity, like the Sancti Spíritus SIG-B45 cement plant, to manufacture low-embodied-energy, minimum life-cycle-cost recycled ecomaterials like CP-40 pozzolanic cement, micro-concrete tiles and hurricane-proof roofing for microbrigades. Since 2012, 16,985 were resettled following hurricanes Sandy, Matthew and Irma.
However, material-hoarding black markets caused by US blockade shortages impede rapid response: by October 2023, one year after Hurricane Ian, just 45% of the targeted 102,000 damaged Pinar del Río homes had been rebuilt.
From 2013-2018, local production of construction materials, particular concrete and plastic, grew 8-10% annually, and are used primarily for rehousing in hazard-prone northern regions, like Villa Clara. Yet, the plan for CIDEM materials to replace conventional cement, per 2018’s Housing Policy, is hindered by blockade-induced equipment shortages, also forcing dependency on old methods of processing domestic gypsum, limestone, clays and silicates. In the Philippines, insufficient domestic capacity can be circumvented through imports of construction materials from mainland Asia, a luxury not afforded to Cuba in regards to its respective trading giant, North America.
In developing countries, transnational exploitation drives much of all housing displacement, as in the Philippines, and dependency on Western aid, which is causally linked to government instability, cripples the state-led initiative needed for large-scale, coordinated housing and disaster programmes. In Cuba, NGOs play supporting rather than directing roles in early-warning, evacuation, temporary shelter and rebuild, which is coordinated by central planning, civil defence and the military. Cuba’s CIDEM received a World Habitat award for ecomaterials in post-disaster social housing, whereas a similar project in the Philippines saw the award presented to Geneva-based NGO, CARE International.
Generalised scarcity in Cuba
Cuba’s exemplary record in human development comes in spite of being hamstrung by economic scarcity, caused by a lack of capacity to import or domestically produce materials, new factories, specialised equipment and energy, which are crucial to housing construction. This scarcity is enforced by the US blockade. This has made it difficult for Cuba to adjust to internal or external crises on its own terms, such as the 2008 financial crash, inflation, political instability in Latin America, falling remittances, material price hikes, the Coronavirus pandemic, loss of tourism and World economic downturn, not to mention the inherent difficulties of a harsh climate, such as the 2022 Matanzas oil storage plant fire, hurricanes and droughts. All of these factors compound issues of historical scarcity commonly faced by countries emerging from colonial or feudalistic underdevelopment, bringing a struggle since the end of the 2010s reminiscent of the Special Period.
To be sure, Cuba has shown defiant resourcefulness to weather such storms. For example, after the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1991, Cuba’s oil imports halved, while 1992’s Torricelli and 1996’s Helms-Burton legislation further tightened the US blockade. Subsequently, domestic oil and gas production were hugely ramped up, alongside investment into renewables, helping the economy to recover into the millennium. 2004’s Revolución Energética saw on-site generators dispersed across the island, as part of sustainable energy promotion. But Trump and Biden’s new sanctions, instated at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic and just as Cuba had released a new foreign investment blueprint, suffocate Cuba’s growth goals, which aimed to upgrade domestic industry, technology, human capital and infrastructure to improve productivity and self-sufficiency.
Energy scarcity and construction
‘In an underdeveloped country the accumulated needs are so great that, if the country dedicates itself to building houses it does not develop, and if it dedicates itself to development, it cannot build houses.’ Fidel Castro
Housing is a unique social right, as opposed to education or healthcare for example, in that it is intrinsically coupled with construction and manufacturing sectors, which are typically among the most energy intensive sectors in any country. As a result, and especially since the Special Period in Cuba, construction has always been one of the lowest ranked sectors in terms of value added to economic development by GDP, while housing has always ranked second last in social expenditure. This dichotomy was exemplified during the Special Period; while most social expenditures increased or stayed consistent under energy scarcity, housing reduced by up to 40%, and dwellings built per 1,000 inhabitants decreased from 6.1 (1981-89) to 2.8 (1990-94).
56 of the new US sanctions directly target Cuba’s energy sector. In combination with the aforementioned crises, lack of access to finance for maintenance parts for aging thermal power plants and US penalties against Venezuelan oil shipments into Cuba since 2015, it is unsurprising that just 38% of Cuba’s installed 6,558 MW energy capacity is currently available, similar that of 1994. As of September 2023, Cuba imported 86,000 bpd of oil, close to the 2015 figure of 90,000 bpd, from a resurgent Venezuela, somewhat freed by reduced US sanctions as a side effect of the inter-imperialist rivalry in Ukraine. However, due to drilling delays, lack of investment access, hurricanes, expiring wells and fluctuating oil prices, Cuba’s own oil production has been declining, from 51,000 bpd in 2013 to 31,000 in 2023, and is mostly heavy, high sulphur oil that is difficult and expensive to process. As a result, blackouts have been common over the past few years, especially in 2022, causing intermittent operation of production lines, an industrial output decline in steel and construction materials, and oil refining itself. Expensive Turkish generators have been rented to fill the energy deficits that have plagued the sector since 2019. Recent investments in cement and metallurgy industries cannot be fully recouped under such energy conditions.
Due to lost income and difficulties circumventing US sanctions, and with investors attacked by the cynical addition of Cuba to the US ‘sponsors of terrorism’ list, $16 million per day was lost to Cuba in the first 14 months of Biden’s presidency. Without the shackles of the US blockade, Cuba could take advantage of its sizeable oil fields by building on recent successes such as the Barcuranao and Australian independent Melbana’s Alameda discovery. Funds are not available to support alternatives for long term energy security, such as advance payments for new Russian thermoelectric plants, or large-scale forays into renewable energy, despite studies showing that Cuba could run entirely on renewables by taking advantage of its climate.
Material scarcity and construction
Material scarcity caused by the US blockade also contributes to Cuba’s declining housing construction numbers, which has dropped from 9.9 per 1,000 persons in 2006 to 1.8 in 2022. Correspondingly, whilst still much better than comparable states, percentage of urban slum dwellers has quintupled since the millennium.
The shortage of fuel, caused by the inability to trade in US dollars, cascades into material scarcity too, and is attributed to $238,180,000 worth of losses from 2019 to 2020 in cement, aggregates, blocks, prefabricated and ready mixed concrete, wood and steel production capability, of which 96% affects the housing sector.
The difficulties either side of 2020 have brought about consistent domestic underproduction of grey cement, corrugated steel bars and billets. Additionally, housing construction materials for domestic use are always in a delicate economic dance with export needs, with billets, aggregates, cement and raw material for cement being Cuba’s most sold items in 2015 and 2018. Although the best production year in 12 years, 2022’s concrete block output was less than half required to meet Cuba’s Housing Plan targets, with the most complex needs identified in the five eastern provinces, Camagüey, Villa Clara, Havana and Pinar Del Río. Of all recovery programs, such as agriculture, electricity and roads, housing has experienced greatest delays.
Scarcity has bred black markets, which has reduced the official stock of construction materials for self-help, and where prices rocket to 10 to 50 times their authorised, subsidised price. During the first half of 2023, Pinar del Río was short 3,700 tons of cement from its housing fund as a result.
Marketisation
Cuba has had to ‘roll with the punches’ to solve immediate and mid-term issues of scarcity, low productivity and economic issues by engaging controlled market mechanisms to ensure that the socialist core promises of its society are upheld. Rather than demonstrating a break with the past, Cuba has been pragmatically introducing, tailoring, and withdrawing these mechanisms within the socialist framework since the earliest days of the revolution. For example, the revolutionary government’s first constitution in 1976 recognised the private holdings of small private farmers and cooperatives. Foreign investment joint ventures with the state were first approved in 1982, and were further opened up during the Special Period. The 1984 housing law, which provided legal framework to private individuals or collectives building houses with state materials and expertise, also allowed free market buying and selling of houses and land, which led to some property speculation and was restricted thereafter.
More recently, the 2011 Decree 288 gave legal framework for direct private house buying, formalising decades-old grey and black real estate markets and yielding a 4% seller tax for the state on each sale or transfer. This came alongside legislation that would also ensure fair, rather than inflated or underdeclared prices, provide loans for repairs, reduce wastefulness in subsidies for those who could afford repairs without them, establish hybrid private-state cooperatives to stimulate manufacture of construction materials, allow emigrees to transfer property and funnel funds for upgrades to family, approve holiday rentals for tourists, sell unfinished state homes to individuals for completion, and open up 1,100 DIY building supply centres across the country for private housebuilders. Economic measures of the 1990s were pulled back or reintroduced as part of a wave of reforms designed to stimulate domestic production and growth following the 2008 financial crash, which followed deep public consultation. All this led to a boom in construction and repair of Cuba’s housing stock. A 2010 survey that showed while Cuban economists welcomed market mechanisms such as credit for repairs, introducing a fully-fledged mortgage system as a concept was very unpopular.
In 2019, this strategy was recognised in the New Cuban Constitution, via the existence of private property for individuals or legal entities, as well as enabling the creation of micro-to-medium enterprises within said property. This gave an over-delivery of houses constructed that year. The Constitution, approved by 87% of the 84% of Cubans who voted, gave legal framework to previously anomalous private businesses that emerged after the 2011 reforms, in order to reconcile some of the contradictions within Cuba’s socialist development brought about by increased market mechanisms and foreign investment. This is part of a wider strategy to decentralise, strengthen domestic production, improve housing provision and develop hard currency reserves. With the ramped-up US sanctions, foreign ownership in wholesale and retail had to be legalised in 2022 to urgently force raw materials, equipment, new technology and parts for renewable electrification into the country, although this is heavily geared towards the benefit of the State and Cuban people.
The Constitution also reaffirmed that the State regulates property concentration to conserve the boundaries compatible with socialist values of equity and social justice. Although largely accurate, especially when compared internationally, novel forms of housing inequality unique to Cuba have crept in since the Special Period and have accelerated since the millennium, reversing some of the substantial progress made since the Revolution in neighbourhood diversity in ethnicity and class. For example, decades of black markets, informal local housing markets, and now legal housing market, especially around Havana, beaches and resorts, while informal, non-institutionalised or regulated heavily by the State, have nonetheless given rise to a concentration of those with higher purchasing power in more desirable areas. While far from a nascent bourgeoisie, this group often has access to dollars and remittances from family in the United States, and act as conduits for property ownership for actors abroad. The ‘necessary evil’ of market mechanisms has generated use of imported resources and a group of private interests within the country with growing economic, if not necessarily political, power. However, since 2011, the Cuban government has responded to pressure to address growing inequality, with strengthened regulation on accumulation, legislation and taxation enforcement to ensure the social benefits of private mechanisms are felt, coinciding with the current overarching plan to strengthen the State in general.
‘A house to live, not to live from’. This key principle holds the social function of housing as paramount in Cuba, underpinning more than 60 years of housing policy on the island, the results of which can only be properly gauged against the underdevelopment of housing in similar nations, as well as pre-revolutionary Cuba. Against the market housing system of the Philippines, tenure security, affordability, construction, housing quality, disaster resilience and ecomaterials are superior in Cuba. The scale of Cuban achievements in housing, as in other areas of human development, becomes even more noteworthy considering the severe material and energy scarcity imposed by the US blockade, which is the longest in history, causing extreme hardship to Cuba’s people and impacting housing construction and quality in particular. Particularly for nations under the thumb of imperialism, Cuba’s example shows that only a socialist solution, where housing is not a tool for profit but a guaranteed right, can meet the needs of humanity.
Saajan Gill
Full report, including calculations and references: tinyurl.com/CubanHousing
