CUBASTANDARD: “Cuba's property rights —what's in it for foreign investors?”, por José Manuel Pallí, Esq. (inglés)

At first glance, neither the changes made by way of DL 288/11, nor the reform of Cuba’s land title recording system we have been discussing seem to have a significant impact on foreign real estate investment in Cuba.
However, the reform of the Registro de la Propiedad has, from its very beginning, been tied to foreign investors’ need to ascertain the strength of the rights they may be acquiring  — including against the pre-revolutionary owners’ interests — and investors’ potential need to use those assets as security for borrowing back home.
And the strengthening of the property rights of the regular Cuban citizen (the proverbial cubano de a pie) is also an incentive for foreign investment, to the extent that it brings a sense of stability to an area that is mired in a haze of confusion due to, among other factors, American laws that purport to play a role in matters such as who owns what in Cuba. Property rights are only as strong as the support they find within the society were they are to be exercised. The late Senator Jesse Helms and his acolytes owned a franchise in this business of  “protecting” —and, presumably, eventually assigning — property rights in foreign lands, with rather questionable effects in Nicaragua, for instance.
Of course, the other side of the coin also deserves a hearing: Absent a full restoration of the Rule of Law — that is seen as protecting the rights of those pre-revolutionary owners — and all its accouterments, no foreign investor in his right mind will ever invest a penny in Cuban real estate, claim many of my good friends and neighbors. But let us look into this argument from a different perspective.