Households in Cape Verde live among the wishes of a nuclear, patriarchal and monogamic family and the creation of strategies to drift the multiple constraints — such as poverty, migration, gender-based violence and discredit in a marital relationship — with which they are confronted in their daily lives and which overturn the realisation of this project, personal, family and national. Focusing on ethnography, on the basis of participating observation and in-depth interviews with women on the island of Saint Vincent, heads of family in single-parenthood homes, this article analyses the meanings and importance that the Cuban women attach to the absence and presence of a man in the home and problematic these meanings within a framework of paradoxies and contradictions, concluding that these women play the role of supporting the house, but, because they want a house of respect and respect for others, they negotiate the possibility of having a man in the home, even if he does not support, but who have had. Because, for these women, homeless without men is a drifting vessel.