Cuba Luxury Rent

Cuba's tax office values a bedroom at 90,000 pesos.
A garage adds 15,000. A patio and gardens add 17,500. You total them, multiply by a location coefficient, and that's what the state thinks your house is worth — printed in an annex, line by line, so a family can work it out at the kitchen table.
The coefficients are the interesting part. Playa, Plaza de la Revolución, La Habana Vieja, Trinidad, Cárdenas and Viñales sit at 6.0, named as Zones of High Significance for Tourism. Cerro and Centro Habana take 5.0. Most of the country takes 1.5.
Sales have been legal since November 2011 and the price is whatever the two sides agree. But the tax base can never fall below that state number, and in a swap — a permuta — the state number is the whole basis. The ministry calls the floor a containment measure against under-declaration. Everyone knows what that means.
New on the Journal: what a permuta is, what it costs, and the fifteen-year subsidy obligation that can follow a house from one owner to the next.
Cuba Luxury Rent. In Cuba since 2000.

https://cubaluxuryrent.com/what-is-a-permuta-in-cuba/

Permuta in Cuba: The Swap Rules Behind 2026 Prices A permuta in Cuba is a notarised home swap. Cuba freed sale prices in 2011, but the state's own valuation still sets the floor under every transfer

The best meal you'll eat in Havana has no website.
Not a bad website. None. It has a cook, a dining room with eight tables, and a phone that a particular kind of person already has in their contacts.
That's most of what a concierge is for here. Cuba runs on who picks up.
Some of what that unlocks in practice: the rooftop table held back for people the house knows. A licensed driver and a restored convertible for the photographs, plus an air-conditioned car for the road. A rum tasting led by a maestro ronero - UNESCO put that body of knowledge on its intangible heritage list in 2022. A son trio playing three metres from your chair, in your own courtyard; Cuban Son joined the same list in 2025.
And ci**rs through the official channel, which matters more than people think. Habanos distributes 27 handmade brands under protected appellations of origin. Anything offered on the street is outside that chain.

https://cubaluxuryrent.com/private-concierge-in-cuba/

Cuba Luxury Rent. In Cuba since 2000.

Private Concierge in Cuba: What It Opens in 2026 A private concierge in Cuba opens what has no booking page: the paladar table, the classic car, the son trio, the boat. What we arrange in 2026

People buy the patio.

Every viewing in Habana Vieja goes the same way. The tiles, the ironwork, the light coming down the well in the middle of the house. Then somebody looks up at the roof timbers, and the whole conversation changes.

Here's what actually decides a restoration in Old Havana, and it isn't the architect. It's a number between one and five.

Cuba's Decreto 92/2023 gives every heritage building a protection grade, I to V. Grade I is a declared monument and the work has to preserve what makes it one. Grade V can be demolished with approval. The grade attaches to the building, not the owner, and it survives a sale. Same street, two houses, two completely different projects.

Then there's the second permit. Inside the Historian's conservation zone, every intervention also needs an Autorizo para Obras y Usos. Two files, two queues, and one can stop the other.

Twenty-six categories of work count as an intervention. Repainting the front wall in the wrong colour is one of them.

We've written the whole thing out, with the article number on every claim.

https://cubaluxuryrent.com/restoring-a-colonial-building-old-havana/

Cuba Luxury Rent. In Cuba since 2000.

Restoring a Colonial Building in Old Havana in 2026 Restoring a colonial building in Old Havana runs on five protection grades and an Autorizo para Obras y Usos. What Cuba's 2023 heritage rules require.

Every event brief we get for Havana starts with a photograph. A courtyard, a band, a long table under an arcade.

Then someone asks how many people fit, and the photograph stops answering.

So here's the actual inventory. The Palacio de Convenciones in Siboney: 60,000 square metres, open since August 1979, eleven halls seating 70 to 400 apiece around a plenary for about 1,500, and six channels of simultaneous interpretation wired in since the day it opened. PABEXPO next door for flat-floor work and galas - it ran the Habanos Festival closing auction in 2025, which raised 17.94 million euros in one evening. EXPOCUBA out in Arroyo Naranjo, 600,000 square metres, where Cuba's largest trade fair used about three per cent of the ground. And the UNESCO-listed buildings of Old Havana, 238.7 hectares of fortresses and palaces, for the dinner nobody forgets.

Each one does a different job. Pick the wrong one and you spend the budget fixing the building instead of running the programme.

We've written the whole comparison out, with the source on every number.

Cuba Luxury Rent. In Cuba since 2000.

https://cubaluxuryrent.com/havana-corporate-event-venues/

Which Venues Can Host a Havana Corporate Event? Havana's corporate venues, with the numbers: the Palacio de Convenciones, PABEXPO, EXPOCUBA and the UNESCO-listed buildings of Old Havana. Which fits what.

Spanish below
Walk down Mercaderes and every second doorway looks colonial. Heavy double doors, a cool passage, a patio with one plant in it.

Here's the thing almost nobody abroad knows before they fall for a photograph: the Oficina del Historiador counts 3,370 buildings in Old Havana's 214-hectare historic centre, and puts roughly two-thirds of that stock in the first decades of the 20th century. About 500 are considered of high heritage value.

So "is it colonial?" is not the question that decides anything. The question is what protection grade the building carries - I to V, under Decreto 92/2023 - because the grade is what says whether you may adapt it, restore it, or barely touch it.

We've written the whole thing out: the zaguan, the patio, the puntal, the entresuelo, what a ciudadela is, and what the law says has to happen when a protected house changes hands.

Cuba Luxury Rent. In Cuba since 2000.
Todo el mundo dice "casa colonial". Casi nadie dice de qué tipo.

El Plan Maestro de la Oficina del Historiador tiene 3 370 inmuebles registrados en las 214 hectáreas del Centro Histórico, y unos 500 se consideran de alto valor patrimonial. Dos terceras partes del fondo se construyeron en las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Coloniales de aspecto, republicanas de fecha.

Lo que sí decide todo es el grado de protección. El Decreto 92/2023, en su Artículo 136.1, establece cinco grados, del I al V, y cada uno marca qué se puede tocar en el inmueble y qué no.

Y una que conviene saber antes de comprar: según el Artículo 82 de la Ley 155/2022, en un bien declarado Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación hay que dar cuenta de la intención de venta, y el Consejo Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural puede ejercer tanteo y retracto.

Lo explicamos entero: el zaguán, el patio, el puntal, el entresuelo, la ciudadela.

Cuba Luxury Rent. En Cuba desde el año 2000.

A wedding in Cuba is a notarial act. That sounds like a technicality until you read what the same signature does.
Cuba's Family Code says a marriage produces legal effects only when it's formalised before a notary or a Civil Status registrar. Article 201.3, one sentence, no room to argue. So the ceremony on the terrace is a ceremony. The marriage happens at a desk.
And at that same desk, unless the couple has signed a pact beforehand, they enter the community of marital property - which then covers income earned during the marriage and anything bought with common funds, even when the deed carries one name.
On 7 January 2026 the rules around that desk changed. Witnesses gone. A five-working-day publicity window added.
We wrote the whole thing up, article by article, from the Gaceta Oficial itself. Link in the first comment.

Cuba Luxury Rent - in Cuba since 2000.

There is a document that settles the oldest argument in Havana, and hardly anybody who buys or sells a home here has read it.

In 2024 Cuba's Ministry of Finance and Prices sorted the country into five tiers and gave each one a multiplier. Havana's 15 municipalities landed in three of them. Playa, Plaza de la Revolucion and La Habana Vieja at 6.0. Cerro, Centro Habana and Diez de Octubre at 5.0. The other nine at 4.0.

Here is the part people miss. The construction values underneath are identical everywhere in Cuba - so many pesos a bedroom, so many for a garage. Only the coefficient moves. Two identical three-bedroom flats, one in Miramar and one in Santos Suarez, are taxed 15,600 pesos apart per side, and the only difference between them is the address on the deed.

Centro Habana is the odd one out, and it's the interesting one. Most crowded municipality in Cuba. Shares a street line with Old Havana. Sits a full tier below it.

We pulled both resolutions from the Gaceta Oficial and read them in Spanish. New piece in the Journal, with the full tier table and what the extra permission step in the tourism zone actually requires.

On 28 July, workers took a ladder to the front of the Hotel Cohiba in Vedado and unscrewed the Melia sign. Thirty-six years, gone in an afternoon.

Melia ended management of all its Cuban hotels on 24 July. Iberostar said the same day it no longer operates or markets a single hotel in Cuba. Canada's Blue Diamond had already gone on 30 May, handing back 11,139 rooms across five brands at once.

The buildings didn't close. They belong to Cuban state companies and always did. What left was the management contract, the booking system, and the number you called when something went wrong at 2am.

Nine hotels have already been renamed. Melia Cohiba is Hotel Cohiba. Iberostar Grand Packard is Hotel Packard. Tryp Habana Libre is Hotel Habana Libre. If you hold a paid booking, Cubatur says it stands.

We spent this week checking every chain's own website rather than the booking sites, and wrote up what's actually left. Three operators are still selling Cuba. One of them is expanding.

Full piece in the first comment.

Something changed in a Cuban notary's office on 7 January 2026, and almost nobody who owns property on the island has heard about it.
Ley 175 "Del Notariado" came into force that day, replacing a law from 1984. It does three things that matter if you own a house in Cuba.
It gives the notary a deadline. Seven working days to authorise a purchase deed - written into Anexo I of Resolución 332/2025, counted from the day your matter goes in the book, with the cause of any delay recorded.
It publishes what the notary charges, on a fixed scale rather than a conversation.
And it lets a party attend the signing by videoconference, as long as one party is physically there and a Cuban consular official or a local notary sits with the one who isn't. For a family spread across three countries, that is the difference between a sale and a stalemate.
None of which helps if the house isn't in the Registro de la Propiedad. That part hasn't changed, and it's still where most Cuban sales quietly stop: the Registrar doesn't reject an incomplete file, he declines to file it at all, so the fifteen-day clock never starts.
We wrote the whole sequence out - every step, every legal deadline, every norm reference. Link in the first comment.

Spanish below

A planner asked us last month whether Cuba could hold forty people for four days in March. The honest answer took ten minutes and a lot of numbers, so here it is in one line: not at forty, and not on a date signed a year out.
Here's the fact that decides it. Since 12 August, Cuba's Ministry of Transport sells intercity bus tickets three days before travel, because it can't promise the fuel any further ahead. Three days. An incentive programme gets contracted twelve months ahead.
Everything else follows from that gap. Iberia now says Madrid-Havana won't fly again before June 2027. Seven international hotel chains have left, taking 46% of the country's rooms with them, and one operator's withdrawal explicitly voided room blocks already signed for coming seasons. On 12 August the grid ran 2,197 MW short, with the deepest cut of the day landing at 20:50 - dinner hour.
What still works: eight to twenty-five people, one city, a private house with its own generator and cistern, transport contracted by the week. That programme runs beautifully right now. We've watched guests not notice a single outage across four days, because the house was built to handle it.
We've worked in Cuba since 2000. Today what we sell is the reading, not the promise. If you're scoping something small for 2027, we'll tell you what won't work before we tell you what will.


Un organizador de eventos nos preguntó el mes pasado si Cuba podía recibir a cuarenta personas durante cuatro días en marzo. La respuesta honesta llevó diez minutos y muchas cifras. Resumida: con cuarenta no, y con una fecha firmada con un año de antelación tampoco.
El dato que lo decide es administrativo. Desde el 12 de agosto, el Ministerio del Transporte vende los pasajes nacionales de ómnibus, tren y transporte marítimo tres días antes del viaje, porque no puede garantizar el combustible más allá. Tres días. Un programa de incentivos se contrata con doce meses de anticipación.
Todo lo demás sale de esa diferencia. Iberia ya dice que Madrid-La Habana no volará antes de junio de 2027. Siete cadenas hoteleras internacionales se fueron, con el 46% de las habitaciones del país, y la salida de un operador dejó sin efecto bloqueos de habitaciones ya firmados para las próximas temporadas. El 12 de agosto la Unión Eléctrica reportó un déficit de 2 197 MW, y el corte más profundo del día anterior cayó a las 20:50: la hora de la cena.
Lo que sí funciona: de ocho a veinticinco personas, una sola ciudad, una casa privada con planta eléctrica propia y cisterna, transporte contratado por semana. Ese programa hoy sale impecable. Hemos visto grupos pasar cuatro días sin notar un solo apagón, porque la casa estaba preparada.
Trabajamos en Cuba desde el año 2000. Hoy lo que vendemos es la lectura del terreno, no la promesa. Si está armando algo pequeño para 2027, le decimos primero lo que no va a funcionar.