The Cost of Construction in Cuba: My Personal Case

Building a wall might seem like a simple task, but when it comes to costs, the reality can be quite different. In Cuba, the costs of construction materials and labor can be pretty high, especially when compared to the average person’s salary. However, thanks to Hive, I’ve been able to finance part of the construction of a wall in my house in a much shorter time. Here’s how I did it.

I’m going to start by talking about the necessary materials for construction. The first thing to say is that getting all of them can be a bit tricky, due to the scarce availability of many of them, the other thing is the high price and that many times you have to pay above that price to get what you want. For the wall I’m building, I had to buy several materials that I’ll break down next.

The cost of a bricklayer can vary depending on the complexity of the job and the worker’s experience as well as the duration of the job. I won’t spend this money since my father is a bricklayer and he’s going to do the work for free and I’m going to be the helper, so the labor will be free (luckily). For labor costs, I’m going to save over 10000 Cuban Pesos (CUP) without even doing the math.

If we take all this into account and compare it to the salary of an average worker in Cuba, which is about 4200 CUP, the cost of living, that salary doesn’t even give you enough to eat, the house would fall on top of me without me being able to do anything. I work on my own in the IT sector, so I receive more than double the salary of a worker with an average salary in Cuba per month, my net salary range is between 10000 and 12000 CUP. Making a “effort” per month I could save about 5000 CUP so to buy the materials it would have taken between 7 and 8 months.

How Hive helped me build sooner. Over the past two months, I’ve been withdrawing money from Hive once a month, setting up my posts to collect the earnings from them 50% in HP and 50% in $HBD, the $HBD accumulated each month I’ve extracted through @hiveremesas, a Cuban business that allows you to extract both $HIVE and $HBD and convert it directly to CUP or Freely Convertible Currency (MLC) and from there pay directly with the card or go to the bank or Automated Teller Machine (ATM) and withdraw the cash.

During the month of September, I managed to accumulate 45 $HBD for which I got about 9675.00 CUP at an exchange rate of 1 HBD = 215 CUP, for the month of October I accumulated about 49.6 $HBD that at a rate of 1 HBD = 230 CUP I got about 11408.00 CUP, reaching a total of 21083 CUP over those 2 months which has allowed me to build about 6 months earlier.

This money plus what I’ve been able to save from my job has been a great boost, in a few days I’ll have the wall finished and my house a bit safer. Without Hive, I would have had to wait several more months to be able to build that wall, maybe some appliance or some furniture would have been ruined, as it was the exterior wall of my bedroom which is also my workspace.

I’m sure there are many stories like mine out there, in countries like mine, where a few $HBD can help you a lot. I believe my case has been one more where you can see the impact that Hive can have on people’s lives. So I will not stop working and promoting the adoption of Hive so that it reaches more people in which it really makes a good impact on their lives.

If Hive has helped you achieve a goal, build something, get something you needed, leave me in the comments to know your story and serve as examples to many who still do not know how our ecosystem impacts people’s real lives.