CubanPortal is an online property platform built specifically for the Cuban market. It brings together two things that until now lived apart: a catalogue of housing listings across the island, and a library of guides explaining how buying, selling, renting and inheriting a home in Cuba actually works.
Cuba’s housing market has only been legal since 2011, and since then it has run mostly on word of mouth, hand-written signs and scattered social-media groups. There is no public price registry, no accessible official appraisals and no database of closed sales. That leaves most people making the largest financial decision of their lives without information. CubanPortal exists to narrow that gap.
What you can do here
The site has two halves that lean on each other. The first is the catalogue: thousands of listings for houses, apartments, penthouses and land, for sale and for rent, across the country’s fifteen provinces. You can filter by province, municipality and neighbourhood, by price range, by bedrooms and bathrooms, and by the details that actually decide a purchase in Cuba: a private cistern, a garage, a ground floor, or whether the seller accepts payment in foreign currency. You can also explore the map and jump straight to a specific area, from Vedado to Santiago de Cuba.
The second half is the editorial content, and it is what separates us from a classifieds board. We publish guides on the sale process, the documents the law requires, the taxes each party pays, the permuta with compensation, inheriting a home from abroad and inspecting a property before paying for it. We also publish a market page for each of Havana’s fifteen municipalities and for the provinces with the most activity, written by hand for each zone. And we offer a calculator that estimates what a home is worth from the comparable listings actually published.
- Search and compare listings across Cuba, free and without signing up.
- Contact the person who published a listing directly: phone, WhatsApp or email.
- Read practical guides on paperwork, taxes, prices and risks.
- Check real average prices by province, municipality and neighbourhood.
- Publish your own home with photos, a description and a location on the map.
What we are not
CubanPortal is not an estate agency. We do not represent either party, we do not take part in negotiations, we do not hold anyone’s money and we do not charge commission on any transaction. Buyers and sellers deal directly with each other.
We are not notaries or lawyers either. Our guides explain how the system works and cite the rule they rely on, but they do not replace professional advice on a specific case. In Cuba a home sale is formalised before a notary, and no website can substitute for that step.
And we do not verify the title of every property advertised. We publish listings submitted by owners and by agents, we apply publishing rules and we remove anything clearly fraudulent or misleading, but checking the paperwork of a specific home is the buyer’s job, together with their notary. Our guides explain exactly how to do it.
How the site is funded
We prefer to say this openly, because it affects what you read. CubanPortal is supported by two sources of income, and neither of them depends on a transaction closing.
The first is paid listings: searching, reading and making contact are free forever, but publishing a home requires a credit or an annual subscription for professional agents. That small cost is also a filter — it keeps the catalogue clean, active and free of spam.
The second is advertising. We work with a single ad provider at a time, and today that is Ezoic, a Google Certified Publishing Partner. We never run formats that put themselves between you and the content: no pop-unders, no pop-ups, no full-screen interstitials, no redirects on click. You can review what is installed in your browser in our cookie policy, and change your preferences at any time.
No advertiser pays to appear inside a guide, and no guide is written, altered or withdrawn at an advertiser’s request. How we research and write that content is described in our editorial policy.
What we commit to
We commit to three concrete things. To accuracy: every guide cites the rule or source it relies on, separates what is already in force from what has merely been approved, and gets corrected when the law changes. To privacy: we do not sell your data, and consent for analytics and advertising cookies is requested before they are installed. And to accessibility: the site is in Spanish and English, works on any device, and is built to load quickly on slow connections, because that is the reality across most of the island.
We also assume we will get things wrong. If you find an incorrect fact in a guide, a suspicious listing or a price that does not add up, write to us: correcting quickly is part of the commitment.
Talk to us
Questions, suggestions, or a correction to send us? We would like to hear from you. Visit our contact page or write to us directly — we read every message.