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Several studies of Havana's housing market to date reiterate that, in the absence of a local housing finance system and in a context characterized by low levels of private capital accumulation and depressed real wages in the state sector, the property market legalized in 2011 depends almost entirely on extra-local capital. We seek to explain how the expansion of international mobility from and to Cuba is correlated with Havana's housing market's extraverted nature, as well as with the resulting socio-spatial reconfiguration of the city. To do so, we identify some of the most important regulations as well as geopolitical conjunctures that brought about the multiplication of transnational flows directly related to the mobilization of the housing market and to the geographical distribution of its segments since the 1990s to date. Additionally we look into fifteen cases of housing investment to identify some salient informal transnational investment trends as well as the transnational micro networks and pathways that enable and structure such investment. We conclude that the story of how specifically mobility and migration rules relaxed in reforming Cuba and how this correlates with the way Havana's housing market has been forming, is not one of sweeping, large scale institutional change, but that this has not prevented Havana from experiencing processes of housing commodification with similar effects to those experienced by cities worldwide, such as touristification and house price inflation caused by extra-local demand from migrants, expats and foreigners.
