The guides on this site deal with money, legal procedures and, in many cases, the only property a family owns. That puts them in the category of content where being wrong is not a small matter, and it is why we publish how we work rather than asking you to take it on trust.
This page explains who writes the guides, where the information comes from, how we handle rules that have been approved but are not yet in force, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Who writes the guides
The guides are written and maintained by the CubanPortal editorial team. We do not publish them under invented personal bylines: attributing an article to a fictional expert is a common trick for manufacturing credibility, and we would rather have none of it.
What the team does have is the data. CubanPortal operates a listings platform covering the whole island, so the parts of these guides that describe how the market behaves — what moves prices, what buyers ask on the first call, which paperwork problems block sales — come from the transactions and listings we see every day, not from repeating what other sites say.
We are not lawyers or notaries, and the guides are not legal advice. Where a decision depends on the specifics of your case, we say so and we tell you who to ask.
How we research
The order of preference is always the same: the primary legal source first, official Cuban institutions second, established journalism third.
- The Official Gazette of the Republic of Cuba, for the text of laws, decree-laws and resolutions.
- Institutional sources — the National Assembly, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance and Prices, the ONAT — for procedures and figures.
- Cuban and international press, used to establish dates and to follow legislative process, never as the sole basis for a legal statement.
- Our own platform data, for anything about prices, demand and how the market behaves.
How we cite
Every guide that makes a legal claim carries a Sources section listing the full legal reference: the type of instrument, its number, its year and, where relevant, the Gazette issue and date. A reader should be able to find the norm from what we print, without a link.
Links are the exception rather than the rule, and that is deliberate. Official Cuban sites have irregular availability, and a dead link is a worse quality signal than a complete reference with no link at all. We only add a URL when we have checked that it responds.
Approved is not the same as in force
This is the rule that matters most in Cuba right now, and the one most often broken elsewhere. A Cuban law takes effect when it is published in the Official Gazette, and often only after a further period stated in the text itself.
So when a norm has been approved but not published, or published but not yet in force, we say exactly that, we give the date of each step, and we describe what the rule that is actually in force says today. We never write about a pending change in the present tense.
The clearest current example is the Housing Law approved by the National Assembly on 30 July 2026: real, approved, widely reported, and not applicable to a single transaction until it is published and the period set in its text has elapsed.
Figures, and why we send you to the counter
Tax rates, reference values, notarial fees and consular requirements in Cuba change more often than a published guide can track. Where we give a figure, we give the norm it comes from and the date it applied.
And we always add the same instruction: confirm the current figure with the notary, with the ONAT or with the consulate before you sign anything. A guide is for understanding the shape of a procedure, not for being the last word on a number.
Updates and corrections
Each guide shows its publication date and, when it has been revised, the date of the last revision. When a legal change makes part of a guide wrong, we rewrite the affected section rather than leaving it up with a note.
If you find an error — a wrong figure, an outdated rule, a procedure that no longer works that way — write to us through the contact page. Tell us which guide and which paragraph, and if you have the source, include it. We check every report, and corrections that affect a reader's decision are made as a priority.
Independence from advertising
This site is financed by listing credits and by advertising. Advertising is served by a single provider, Ezoic, which runs the auction; we do not choose which advertiser appears next to which article, and no advertiser has any say in what a guide says.
Where a guide recommends one of our own tools — the price calculator, for instance — it is because the tool answers the question the guide raised, and we say plainly what the numbers behind it are and are not.
What these guides are not
They are not legal advice, they are not an appraisal and they are not a substitute for a notary. Cuban housing procedures depend on the specific property, the specific family situation and the specific office handling it.
Use the guides to arrive at the counter knowing what to ask, what to bring and what should worry you. That is what they are good for, and it is worth a great deal.