TravelGuide-Alamar-2016-web

24 | the Alamar travel guide
Chapter II:
Housing in Alamar
This chapter of the travel guide will provide you with background information about
the history and main characteristics of the housing in Alamar. Housing is the social
mirror of a city, according to Lopez Castaneda 1 : the residential stock reflects the
social contradictions of a city. So following Castaneda, to get to know and start to
understand a city like Alamar, housing could serve as a good starting point.
Furthermore we will show you one of the main features that makes Alamar different
from other New Towns: the informality and land appropiation by residents, specifically
found in the courtyards. At the end of this chapter you will find the “housing highlights”
of Alamar, that will take you along different points of interest. The numbers in the text
refer to the map of the walk on pages 32-33.
Housing policy
In 1959, the revolutionary government of Cuba defined three new basic principles
for their urban housing policy. Firstly: to put an end to land and housing speculation.
The second principle was to favor low-income Cubans burdened by high rents and
lower the rent by 50%. And the third principle was concerned with building housing
for workers and farmers. Besides these principles, the Cuban government also
decided to give preference to apartment complexes and to come up with technical
building solutions to compensate for the lack of building materials, as a result of the
U.S. embargo of 1960. These principles and objectives of housing in socialist Cuba,
can be easily discovered in Alamar with its prefabricated, Soviet- style architecture
apartments.
Besides technical solutions, another aspect of the housing policy is visible in
Alamar. As a new principle, the state started to rely on active participation of the
future residents of the new housing units. The state supplied building materials and
designated where units needed to be built, while the future tenants actually built
the five-story apartment buildings designed by the government. They organized
themselves in so called Microbrigades: a team of thirty-three workers responsible
for the construction. The Microbrigades were formed within a place of work, like a
factory or school, which gave them a unique focus. In Alamar, the Microbrigades were
mainly formed by workers from a metallurgical factory.
1. Castaneda, L., published in SCARPACI et all, ‘Havana: Two faces of the Antillean Metropolis’, University of North
Carolina, 2002