Cuba set to allow buying, selling of homes

HAVANA, (Reuters) – Cubans will be able to buy and  sell houses for the first time in more than five decades in a  long-awaited reform that legalizes what many have done for  years but also restricts how much property they can own,  state-run press said today.
The reform, which takes effect on Nov. 10, is the latest of  a number of changes under President Raul Castro to modestly  liberalize the island’s Soviet-style economy while maintaining  the communist system put in place after the 1959 Cuban  revolution.
The Communist Party, Cuba’s only legal political party,  approved the notion of home sales at a congress in April.
Details were not yet available, but Communist Party  newspaper Granma said the new rules would allow people to buy  and sell, swap, donate or pass their houses on to heirs.
Cuba’s communist government allows people to own homes, but  in theory has not previously allowed them to sell them for  money.
The swap, or “permuta,” of houses of equal value has been  acceptable for years, but Cubans have traditionally  supplemented trades with under-the-table money if they were  trading a smaller house for a bigger one.
Now they will be able to do a straight up purchase or sale,  but they will have to pay taxes, Granma said.
“Many people have lived and live with the fear of losing  their homes because they acquired in an illegal way. Now  they’ll be able to legalize them and to sleep in peace,” said  Osmel Gonzalez, a self-employed food vendor in Havana.
The reform will eliminate some bureaucratic steps required  to do a deal, but also limit people to owning one home as a  permanent residence and another as a weekend or vacation spot,  the paper said.
While Castro has said Cuba must update its system to assure  its survival well into the future, most reforms so far have  been tempered by rules aimed at limiting the accumulation of  wealth and property.
The housing change follows the recent reform of allowing  people to more freely buy and sell cars, another change  overturning one of the basic tenets of the revolution.
But it also came with limits, the primary one being that  only foreign residents and Cubans with special status — such  as athletes, artists and doctors — can buy new cars.