Havana Journal: Real Estate Fever Spreads in Cuba

But roofs — even half-missing ones — are a hot commodity these days in Havana, which has been swept by a bout of real estate fever. So Yoél Bacallao, a 35-year-old entrepreneur, offered to repair Ms. Martínez’s dilapidated house for free on one condition: that she let him build an apartment of his own on top of it.

“It was as if a ray of light had come down from the sky,” said Ms. Martínez, 41, who would hang laundry in the roofless living room and sweep furiously during rainstorms to keep the rest of the house from flooding. “I have been watching this house fall apart around me for years.”

All over the capital and in many provincial towns, Cubans are beginning to inject money into the island’s ragged real estate, spurred by government measures to stimulate construction and a new law that allows them to trade property for the first time in 50 years.

The measures are President Raúl Castro’s biggest maneuver yet as he strives to get capital flowing on the island, encourage private enterprise and take pressure off the economically crippled state.

For decades, the government banned real estate sales and kept a jealous grip on construction. Materials were scarce, red tape endless and inspectors meddlesome. Black marketeers would deliver cinder blocks by cover of darkness, and purchasing a bag of sand was a furtive process akin to buying drugs.

But during the past two months the state has reduced paperwork, stocked construction stores, legalized private contractors and begun offering homeowners subsidies and credits.

On many streets, the chip of hammers and gritty slosh of cement mixing rises above the sparse traffic as Cubans paint facades, build extensions or gut old houses. Still, it is generally small-scale stuff: Mr. Bacallao, who has savings from his business repairing mobile phones, expects to spend about $10,000 on his project.

“Before, you had to sneak a bag of cement here, a bag of cement there,” he said. Mr. Bacallao, who rents a tiny apartment with his girlfriend, built a rooftop house three years ago, but the state confiscated it because he could not explain how he came by the materials. If this house works out, he will move his daughters to Havana from the provinces.

“Now I can explain where I got the materials,” he said. “I can explain where I got the money. No problem.”

Behind scruffy porticos and walls of bougainvillea, the wheels of the property trade are turning. Unofficial brokers — who are still outlawed in Cuba — say they have never been so busy, trawling the streets and the Internet for leads and fielding calls from prospective buyers.

Cubisima, an online classified service, said the number of hits on its real estate page tripled to an average of 900 per day after the new property law took effect on Nov. 10. The law allows Cubans to buy and sell their houses, and even own a second home outside the cities, though it still bars most foreigners from buying.

It is a crude market, where househunters rely on word of mouth and prices are based as much on excitement as on any clear sense of property values, according to interviews with homeowners, brokers and experts. Buyers, who at the top end are mainly Cuban émigrés and Cubans married to foreigners, often declare a fraction of what they pay, and money sometimes changes hands overseas, suggesting that the government’s hope of reaping significant tax revenues may be at least partly thwarted.

On a recent day, a stylish flight attendant showed a viewer around the pretty three-bedroom home she hopes will fetch $150,000; a mile away, an elderly widow held out for an offer of $500,000 for her big, unkempt 1950s house — to be deposited in Spain, please.

Many sellers plan to downsize, so they can live better or leave. Victoria Pérez, a retired doctor, put her spacious house and two-bedroom annex on sale last month for $80,000. She hopes to buy something smaller and put aside about $20,000 to live on and visit her daughter in the United States.

“To earn $20,000 would take 20 years,” she said. “This opens up a whole world of opportunities.”

Statistics are few, and brokers admit that the curious outnumber the serious. The National Housing Institute processed just 364 sales in the three weeks after the new law took effect.

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Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl Journal: For Some in Mexico, Trash Is a Treasure Worth Defending

A few weeks ago, though, the city closed its giant Bordo Poniente landfill for good, padlocking the gate and trucking the garbage to distant new dumps. Officials have optimistically outlined fast-track strategies to recycle, burn and compost all but a fraction of the garbage that the city now generates.

But that European-style vision of handling garbage stands in sharp relief to the needs of the 1,500 trash pickers, or pepenadores, who rely on the refuse at Bordo Poniente every day for their livelihood.

“The garbage will never run out,” predicted Mr. Téllez, who is 74, at the start of an hourlong monologue during which he cited Socrates (despite being illiterate himself) and compared himself to Galileo. “We have made great advances, and now others are coming to take the business we have created.”

Don Pablo, as all the workers call Mr. Téllez, presides from an office decorated with photographs showing him accompanied by presidents. In the old days, politicians counted on the trash pickers as a base of support. They would help swell campaign crowds, wave flags for visiting dignitaries or even provide pro-government shock troops to attack opposition protests.

Presidents no longer come calling. But the pepenadores can still make politicians take notice.

Several times last year they blocked the arrival of giant trash trailers at the dump to protest the planned shutdown. In response, when Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of Mexico City turned up on Dec. 19 to close the 975-acre landfill and to announce a project for a power plant fueled by the dump’s methane, he also had to promise that the pepenadores could stay.

The city agreed not to close the separation plant where the pepenadores pick through garbage, even though it means the trash must first be delivered to Bordo Poniente, and then reloaded onto trucks to be hauled to the new dumps hours after the pepenadores have finished extracting what they can sell.

“Marcelo pledged that we would be working here for 25 years,” Mr. Téllez warned. “He has to fulfill his commitment.”

In the gloom of the separation plant, a vast shed, workers sift through garbage moving by on three raised conveyor belts, striking an atonal note with every bottle or can they drop into gaping bags below.

Outside, teenagers scrape rust off metal or slice hair and faces off dolls, tossing them into a disconcerting heap of pink vinyl limbs and torsos.

Only one-tenth of the garbage they sort through can be set aside for recycling. And for all that effort, each pepenador makes $39 to $62 a week. The work is likely to become harder.

“Since they closed Bordo, you can tell there is less garbage,” said César Laguna, 46. “The street sweepers and pickers on the trucks go through it, and it doesn’t get here anymore.”

The neighborhood garbage trucks carry their own pepenadores, three or four volunteers who dig through household waste. They make even less than the workers at Bordo Poniente, but at least “we get fewer illnesses working here,” said one of them, Adrián Castellanos.

Héctor Castillo Berthier, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimates that a quarter of a million people in Mexico City depend on trash. He ticks them off: street sweepers, garbage collectors, pepenadores, junk dealers and the families they support.

“Anything you change is going to alter that tradition,” he said. “There are more and more layers of informality. These are complex processes.”

He has no confidence in city officials’ plans to reduce and compost garbage. “They have no Plan A,” let alone a Plan B, Mr. Castillo said. “They are going to bet on a reshuffling of the informal systems.”

Indeed, while keeping the separation plant open at Bordo Poniente placates the pepenadores, it makes little economic sense. The 20-ton trailers that collect the garbage from neighborhood trucks must now make a detour to the plant before driving to far-off landfills that the city is paying to take its garbage.

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Tijuana Journal: Tijuana Journal - A Cultural Clash Over the Bad Old Days

“It’s really gone, wow, La Ocho,” they say, referring to the old, wretched jail where drunk Americans and hardened Mexican criminals huddled behind bars amid the stench of vomit and corruption. But was the demolition, which took place last month, good or bad for Tijuana?

Few cities would even ask, in the face of such civic filth. La Ocho, after all, was a holding pen where American teenagers who were caught with a joint or had too much to drink often had to pay a $2,000 bribe for freedom. It was prison on prime downtown property, where gang leaders roamed free on the top floor as peons suffered below in tiny cells with useless toilets.

Mayor Carlos Bustamante is unapologetic about the decision to tear it down, insisting that La Ocho represented “the darkest side of Tijuana history.” But here in a city without the ancient roots found throughout much of Mexico, history of any kind holds its value.

Many longtime residents are fuming about the prison’s demise. After several failed protests, some have even sued to compel the city to rebuild the complex — which included police and fire stations — exactly as it was, arguing that it was illegally demolished.

“We don’t have too many historical references that can fortify our identity as Tijuanenses,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, a human rights advocate and lifelong resident. “Maybe in terms of architecture, they’re not extraordinary, but they represent the history of the city.”

Preservation disputes are rarely about bricks or design alone, and in the case of La Ocho the argument has become a proxy for this city’s larger struggle over identity, and how much of Tijuana’s sordid past should shape its future. Now, perhaps more than ever, this sprawling border city of 1.6 million people is at a turning point.

Illegal emigration to the United States is down and the tsunami of American tourists that defined Tijuana, starting with Prohibition in the 1920s, has receded as fears of crime and dread over the time it takes to cross the border back into California have increased. Many of the bars that once catered to American students coming here to party are now closed with steel gates. Some say it will be a decade before the flow of young Americans returns.

In the meantime, Tijuana is safer than it has been in years — even drug-related killings are down — and new restaurants, clubs and cafes catering to Mexicans and sophisticated visitors are popping up all over the city. Residents describe this as a moment of energy and rekindled pride, which can be felt among the crowds that gather at popular taco trucks and in clubs playing Latin music, not rock ’n’ roll.

Nearly everyone here seems to agree that this shift should continue — that Tijuana needs to repackage itself and present a new, more upscale image to the world. But the question is how.

Mr. Bustamante, who is also a real estate developer, has said that Tijuana needs to modernize and become more like San Diego. This is an old idea; it got a lot of airtime under former Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, who like Mr. Bustamante, is a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico with a corrupt, heavy hand for 71 years.

In this case, Mr. Bustamante wants to finance a downtown redevelopment zone with money from the sale of the Ocho land. He says it will be a catalyst for broader change.

And some business owners agree. Those with a view of the prison site are especially open to new construction. “We need to renovate,” said Ana Lilia Quintero, 34, who owns Ana’s Salon on Eighth Street. “This could bring new jobs, and new businesses. That’s what we’re hoping.”

To others, however, the demolition reflects shortsighted leadership. A new building? The look of San Diego? These, the critics say, are boring ideas that ignore how Tijuana’s history could become a big, lucrative part of its future appeal.

This was a city where Hollywood stars came to frolic and gamble — like Las Vegas and Havana. Many Tijuanenses who have been trying to revive their hometown by promoting its art, music and food say the prison (which had not been used since 2002) should have been turned into a museum that captured Tijuana’s history of vice. Or a community center for nonprofits or arts groups that could show off the city’s creative side.

“I wanted to have an event in there,” said Javier Plascencia, a renowned chef who owns several popular restaurants in Tijuana. At the time, during an interview last month, he was sitting at Caesar’s, one of his restaurants, where the Caesar salad was said to have been invented in the 1920s. Mr. Plascencia renovated the restaurant a few years ago, fearing that it would be torn down, and he said its regular clientele proved that using the past to move forward could work.

Even a stinking prison, Mr. Plascencia said, deserved a second chance.

“It was ugly,” he said. “But it was ours.”

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