Santiago de Cuba

Guantanamo

Camaguey

Santa Clara

Cuba, Spring 2009

i hate the cold. in a perfect world the weather would drop below fifty degrees and snow only on xmas morning. growing up in the midwest, the cold was normal. now, having spent the past seven years (wow, it's really been that long) in the south attending college and grad school, i've become spoiled and accustomed to warmer climates.

this day, however, was special. my friend, harold (featured) and i met in Cuba during one of my research trips. twice, he's been a lifesaver - giving me enough movies, music, and great conversations to compensate for the lonliness of traveling alone. he and others introduced me to unknown communities throughout Havana. he recently moved to Chicago, and i found it more than appropriate to include iceskating as a part of our exploration of the city... it was his first time on the ice and only my second (both in the year 2008). the weather might have reached 30 degrees that day, yet the holiday music and light now made the day absolutely beautiful...

Fall 2008

Cuba and i have a love-hate relationship, which is why i am both happy to be back and no longer fearful of having to return to the island. over the past several months, i have learned that being alone is hard, but that it is okay and often necessary;that i must learn to see the good in every stage of my life; and that i am incredibly blessed... however, i have yet to feel comfortable in taking pictures of Cubans and their island. the act of taking and showing pictures is just a little too politically charged for me... every conversation, every story, every photo contributes to the discourse-making of Cuban "politics" and "culture" for foreigners to engage. the problem is that they present a fragmented image interpreted by outsiders with economic/citizenship privileges. and i'm not yet comfortable with that, SO i have few pictures of Cubans... instead, i focused mainly on tourism (which i will continue to explore during the spring) and playing with light after a rainstorm...
i took these pictures one saturday afternoon following several raining days. both of us were excited to finally get out of the house and explore. i had been to cuba several times before, but i love walking around and observing that which surrounds me because 1) everything is always changing, as renovation projects and new stores/restuarants seem to emerge every day, and 2) i love being surrounded by the tourists and locals that walk the streets. these pictures are from Habana Vieja (Old Havana) - the oldest neighborhood of the city with beautiful colonial structures.
i focus on tourism because the way in which outsiders experience Cuba intrigues me. often, people come to the island for a ten-day or two-week trip - during which they recieve the standard tour, drink mojitos and listen to live music - and then return to their respective countries to talk about their "experiences." others come for reality tours or political solidarity trips and are all too excited to talk about "cuban life and society." but what does it really mean to experience or understand Cuba as a non-citizen/tourist?

even more interesting is the realization that the ways in which outsiders experience Cuba is manufactured and sold by the state. a tour of habana vieja makes the construction of a tourist reality even more apparent. for example, walking down the mainstreet of obispo, one notices numerous women wearing headwraps or flowers in their hair, in addition to random men and women smoking cigars. live salsa music or the occassional latin jazz son flows from restaurants into the streets, and paintings sold in markets frequently portray weathered colonial buildings, musicians or rumba dancers, or the country landscape. in the middle of these spaces stand tourists with their cameras and video cameras eager to reproduce the stereotypical images of the island...

however, stepping outside of the tourist zones, one realizes that smoking cigars is not a regular event for most, the paintings sold in the market place rarely find their way to the homes of Cuban citizens, and reggaeton music has become equally, if not more popular than the traditional son. (a discussion of how tourism beyond representations of cuban culture deserves further attention, but i'll save that for a later date).