Cuba’s Reward for the Dutiful: Gated Housing

[FrodosPet]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/world/americas/cubas-reward-for-the-dutiful-gated-housing.html

By DAMIEN CAVE - FEB. 11, 2014

HAVANA — In the splendid neighborhoods of this dilapidated city, old mansions are being upgraded with imported tile. Businessmen go out for sushi and drive home in plush Audis. Now, hoping to keep up, the government is erecting something special for its own: a housing development called Project Granma, featuring hundreds of comfortable apartments in a gated complex set to have its own movie theater and schools.

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Cuba is in transition. The economic overhauls of the past few years have rattled the established order of class and status, enabling Cubans with small businesses or access to foreign capital to rise above many dutiful Communists. As these new paths to prestige expand, challenging the old system of rewards for obedience, President Raúl Castro is redoubling efforts to elevate the faithful and maintain their loyalty — now and after the Castros are gone.

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As president, Raúl Castro, 82, has accelerated the growth of what some scholars have described as a military oligarchy. The chairman of the Economic Policy Commission, Marino Murillo, is a former officer. Cuba’s largest state conglomerate, Cimex, which processes remittances from Cubans abroad, among other tasks, is run by Col. Héctor Oroza Busutin. Raúl Castro’s son-in-law, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez, is the top executive at the military’s holding company, known as Gaesa, which is estimated to control 20 percent to 40 percent of the Cuban economy.

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The new housing, a basic necessity in extremely short supply across the island, looks to many Cubans like another attempt at favoritism. According to government figures, the military’s construction budget has more than doubled since 2010. When combined with the Interior Ministry (often described as a branch of the military), the armed forces are now Cuba’s second-largest construction entity.

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