Centro Habana – Faces
Although I arrived in Indonesia several weeks ago for an extended stretch of scuba Divemaster training, I am initiating my blog article series with several posts about my trip to Cuba this past summer (July/August 2018). I wanted to visit Havana while it is still locked in its time warp. Friends recommended the trip, and one connected me with a family of architects he had come to know well while shooting an independent film on the island. The visit was fascinating in terms of people, history, and signs of the Revolution, but also somewhat shocking on account of the deterioration in buildings and infrastructure, and the lost economic opportunities – it just doesn’t seem sustainable.
I began my stay at a casa particular (home stay) in Old Havana (La Habana Viejo), which has many historic sites and plenty of tourists, many of whom come in on very large cruise ships. After a few days I moved to another casa particular in Centro Habana, a large older neighborhood in Havana that has little or no tourist activity. It was easier to catch a more genuine view of Havana life in this dense neighborhood. The physical deterioration of the city hits you right in the face here – with many beautiful old buildings vacant and falling apart. I sometimes wondered about the safety of walking down the street, with old cornices and balconies hanging off the facades, held in place by the exposed concrete reinforcing steel rusting away. There is plenty of life to see in the street, however, with kids playing, street vendors selling, mechanics at work on their old cars, clusters of folks playing cards or chess, and locals just hanging out.
In this first post I’m sharing straight-forward photos of Cubans in Centro. For the most part Cubans were very open to letting me take their portraits. It’s not unusual for people to ask for some money to pause for a portrait shot – usually one CUC (the currency used by tourists, and roughly equal to one US dollar). These requests were often a somewhat after-the-fact attempt to get something out of the interaction, and mostly just half-hearted. On a few occasions I gave small amounts in order to get a portrait I didn’t want to pass up. Most of my Centro photographs were taken on a street named Animas, or within several blocks of it. Animas stretches for a little over half a mile (one kilometer) west from El Prado to Padre Varela, and is just three blocks south of the Malecon, the well-known street and north-facing sea wall, just a little over 100 miles from the US’s Key West – and yet so far away in every other respect.
