---
title: "Cuba's Microbrigadas collectivized the building site, not the design"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/microbrigadas-workplace-housing-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/microbrigadas-workplace-housing-en.md"
category: "ideas"
tags: ["Microbrigadas", "Cuba", "housing", "collective construction", "Alamar", "architecture"]
published_at: "2026-08-26T09:00:00.000Z"
author: "Camille Morel"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/microbrigadas-workplace-housing-fr.md"
---

# Cuba's Microbrigadas collectivized the building site, not the design

In the 1970s, workers temporarily left factories and offices to build housing later allocated by their workplace collective. Construction was participatory; design was far less so.

“Self-help housing” can create the wrong image of Cuba's Microbrigadas. It sounds like a family designing and building its own future home. The program that emerged in the early 1970s worked differently: **the workplace formed the construction team**.[1](https://www.archdaily.com/1183812/radically-collective-the-legacy-of-cubas-microbrigadas-housing-program)[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)

Inside a factory or office, a few employees temporarily left their normal jobs for the building site. These microbrigadistas kept receiving their regular salaries while learning construction. Their colleagues who stayed behind absorbed the missing work so the original workplace could maintain production.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)[3](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582009000300003&script=sci_arttext)

Laying the blocks gave no automatic claim on the finished apartment. The workplace assembly could allocate it to another worker according to housing need and the merit criteria then in use.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)[3](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582009000300003&script=sci_arttext)

The citizen-builder story stops too early. Microbrigadas separated three powers that are easy to bundle together: **who builds, who receives and who designs**.

## The workplace builds

Kosta Mathéy describes the principle publicly proposed in 1970: some workers would be released from their normal duties for a construction brigade, while those who stayed behind had to maintain the productive unit's previous output.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)

The whole workplace became involved in producing housing, even away from the building site. The brigadista contributed directly on site. The coworker who remained contributed by carrying some of the absent worker's load. “Collective effort” extended well beyond concrete.

> MICROBRIGADA
> **The work is split across two sites**
> - released employees learn and build: Building site
> - coworkers maintain normal production: Workplace
> - housing returns to the collective: At completion
> - need + merit, no automatic builder priority: Allocation
> The program turns a workplace into a housing-production unit without moving all of its activity onto the construction site.

The model moved to scale quickly. By 1978 Mathéy counts more than **1,100 teams**, about **30,000 brigadistas** and **82,000 completed dwellings**.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf) Activity was especially strong around Havana, including Altahabana, Reparto Eléctrico, San Agustín, Cotorro and Alamar.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)

Those numbers cannot tell us that the method beat professional construction on efficiency. They do show that it grew far beyond a pilot into a real production channel.

## Building, not planning

“Participation” needs another cut. Dania González Couret's history of Cuban social housing states the division unusually clearly: the population participated in constructing buildings, **but not in their planning and design**.[3](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582009000300003&script=sci_arttext)

The state supplied urban projects, standard building types and technical assistance. ArchDaily likewise describes architects, structural engineers and master builders overseeing sites and training a non-professional workforce.[1](https://www.archdaily.com/1183812/radically-collective-the-legacy-of-cubas-microbrigadas-housing-program)

Participation mostly stopped at the edge of fabrication. Brigadistas could acquire masonry, plumbing, electrical or carpentry skills, but they did not arrive on an empty site with collective authority over the neighbourhood plan.

> **Participation ≠ complete control**
> Diagram separating collective construction labour, allocation by workplace assembly and design by technical institutions
> - Three different powers often hide under one word
> - BUILD
workplace
brigadistas
> - ALLOCATE
workplace
assembly
> - DESIGN
technical
institutions
> - participatory construction ≠ participatory control of every decision
> Microbrigadas strongly collectivized construction labour without transferring all design authority to future residents.

That division of labour also helps explain the visual repetition. Mathéy describes the late-1970s output as mostly standard four- or five-storey walk-up blocks.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf) González Couret describes semi-prefabricated buildings using technologies conventional enough not to require highly skilled labour.[3](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582009000300003&script=sci_arttext)

Standardization reduced what a new builder had to learn before becoming productive. Architectural variety paid part of that bill.

## Alamar repeats

Alamar, east of Havana, became the most familiar image of the period. ArchDaily describes it as one of the large territories reshaped by Microbrigadas, combining prefabricated blocks with schools, shops, green areas and neighbourhood facilities.[1](https://www.archdaily.com/1183812/radically-collective-the-legacy-of-cubas-microbrigadas-housing-program)

At Alamar, the ambition clearly extended beyond the individual apartment. It participated in building whole districts.

That ease of repetition also left a lasting criticism in the landscape. Mathéy already noted urban monotony and attempts to soften it through painted façades and green space.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf) Later studies of Cuban housing return to spatial and environmental quality problems in some Microbrigada work, particularly during the 1980s revival when projects were inserted into more complex existing urban fabric.[5](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582020000100045&script=sci_arttext)

The system could solve a labour-capacity problem. It did not automatically solve urban quality.

## Learning on site

Non-professional builders were not left on their own. Their presence made training and supervision major construction resources in their own right.

In a retrospective account published by Havana Times, Eduardo N. Cordoví recalls very long working days, gradual acquisition of building trades and errors that could occur when improvised builders misread plans or worked around technical problems to meet delivery dates.[4](https://havanatimes.org/diaries/eduardo-n-cordovi/micro-construction-brigades-in-cuba/)

A personal account obviously cannot turn every reported defect into a property of the entire program. It does make the trade-off concrete: rapidly converting office workers, mechanics or nurses into construction labour creates skills and also quality risks that require constant technical support.

> TRADE-OFF
> **Labour is not free**
> - mobilize thousands outside the building industry: Gain
> - coworkers absorb the work left behind: Cost
> - people acquire construction skills: Gain
> - training, supervision and quality become critical: Cost
> Collective labour moves resources around; it does not make them appear.

The phrase “popular mobilization” easily hides that transfer of workload. Releasing an employee for construction means somebody else has to keep doing the activity that pays that salary. The program works because that transfer is institutionally organized.

## Who gets it?

Allocation contains another surprise. Completed dwellings were distributed among workers from the original workplace according to need and merit; Mathéy explicitly notes that brigade members had no automatic priority.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)

González Couret describes the same rule: workplace assemblies allocated homes to those judged to need or merit them most, whether or not they had participated in construction.[3](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582009000300003&script=sci_arttext)

This sits far from a cooperative where each household directly builds its own future home. A beneficiary belongs to a collective producing housing; there is no necessary one-to-one link between their own hours on site and one specific apartment.

The arrangement also created a structural exclusion. Mathéy notes that workplace-based allocation left out some people with serious housing needs who **did not have regular employment**, one criticism surrounding the movement's slowdown by the late 1970s.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)

Taking housing out of a conventional market does not make the access question disappear. It changes the criteria and the institution that decides.

## The slowdown

The first Microbrigada cycle lost momentum in the late 1970s. Authorities increasingly argued that professional state brigades and industrialized systems could produce housing more efficiently and with better quality.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)

Mathéy lists several tensions: disputed productivity, pay differences between brigadistas and professional construction workers, workplaces becoming less willing to release staff, and allocation tied to regular employment.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)

The replacement by industrialized state brigades then failed to deliver all the expected gains. Microbrigadas were revived from 1986 with new forms and more attention to work inside existing neighbourhoods.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)[5](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582020000100045&script=sci_arttext)

The 1986 revival was not a carbon copy of the early 1970s. Goals, organization and urban conditions changed. The experience itself showed that a method built to repeat peripheral blocks could not simply be dropped into the repair of an old city.

## What travels

Mathéy concluded in 1989 that the full model was tightly bound to Cuba's social context and difficult to transfer elsewhere as a whole.[2](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf) That is probably the most useful way to read it today.

Importing “the Microbrigadas” as a ready-made recipe makes little sense. Their operation depended on employers able to release workers while continuing their salaries, coworkers absorbing the missing labour, a state supplying plans and technical assistance, and a housing-allocation system outside a conventional property market.

What travels better is the habit of **separating the layers of the problem**.

A collective housing project can ask who supplies the labour. Separately, who controls design. Then who receives the result. Then who absorbs the cost of time spent building.

Microbrigadas answered the first question radically, the third institutionally, and the second far more centrally.

That is precisely why they remain interesting: a building site can be deeply collective without the whole architecture automatically becoming participatory.

## References

1. [Moises Carrasco, Radically Collective: The Legacy of Cuba's Microbrigadas Housing Program, ArchDaily, August 25, 2026](https://www.archdaily.com/1183812/radically-collective-the-legacy-of-cubas-microbrigadas-housing-program)
2. [Kosta Mathéy, Microbrigadas in Cuba: A Collective Form of Self-Help Housing, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 1989](https://newformalism.aaschool.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Microbrigadas_in_Cuba_A_collective_form.pdf)
3. [Dania González Couret, Medio siglo de vivienda social en Cuba, Revista INVI, 2009](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582009000300003&script=sci_arttext)
4. [Eduardo N. Cordoví Hernandez, Micro Construction Brigades in Cuba, Havana Times, January 8, 2024](https://havanatimes.org/diaries/eduardo-n-cordovi/micro-construction-brigades-in-cuba/)
5. [Dania González Couret, El regreso a la ciudad tradicional. Vivienda social de los 80's en La Habana, Revista INVI, 2020](https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-83582020000100045&script=sci_arttext)