Cuban couple watching Fidel Castro on TV at home, 1997.
I landed in Havana in May. As I rode the minivan from the airport into the city, I looked down at my nervous hands holding a sheet of paper with fading blue lines and the address of my destination and realized I was very alone. I read the address to the bus driver in rusty Argentine Spanish and felt an instant attachment to him. I wanted to spend the rest of my trip on the bus. Through the window I saw that Havana was decrepit. Some buildings had paint peeling away from their facades; others were just a heap of exposed, rotting wood. Rooftops had lost shingles; clothes were hanging up to dry in the pouring rain; boys nonchalantly rode their bikes through twelve-inch puddles. When I got out at my stop, two women and a man looked at me as if I carried a banner that said AMERICAN CAPITALISM. I was a stranger: My shoes were too new and well made for me to be Cuban. Even my hair clip would cost a month’s wages there.
In a travel book I had found an agency that arranged home stays, and they placed me with a woman named Leo, whom I paid $22 a night for a small room. She greeted me as if I were an old friend. On my dresser she left two tiny bars of soap stolen from an American hotel in the mid-1970s. She left chocolates next to the soap. They were stolen from the same hotel.
Three rocking chairs awaited on the glassed-in terrace with a ninth-story view, and Leo and her mother, Graciela, took their places and motioned me to sit. We began exchanging the usual questions, small talk, one-word inferences, and waited for intonations that quickly became familiar. We rocked in our chairs, and everything I had read about the situation in Cuba—the failures of communism, the poverty, the hardships, the lines for food, the struggle for basic amenities, the disparity between those who paid in dollars and those who paid in meager pesos—was confirmed by Leo and Graciela in the span of hours. Our conversation carried on from early evening into the night, and we lingered comfortably with the Cuban breezes blowing in and out of the patio windows. I had expected Cuba to be this ominous, scary dungeon, but the people were so warm, so candid—just like anyone else.
Several days after I arrived, I finally went to Publicitur, the organization that represented Cuba’s International Press Center and provided minders for foreign journalists. Minders were government-appointed guides who accompanied journalists around, wrote up reports detailing every person the journalists interviewed and every place they visited, and then passed this information on to the government. I introduced myself to the secretary at the front desk. They recognized me as “the American journalist”; they were expecting me. The secretary led me to a room where two young women who prided themselves on their textbook English and secondhand knowledge of the outside world were seated at a table. The directors of Publicitur who oversaw the minders were eager to answer a list of questions I had prepared about Cuba and its mechanisms and to arrange my requests to photograph in certain places. I could tell instinctively I would never get the information I wanted from them. They claimed they would arrange shoots for me inside government buildings and hospitals, but I knew that in a country like Cuba they would not. It was my first experience in a country that provided government minders to journalists and blatantly restricted my movements.
While all who worked at Publicitur and the International Press Center were eager to show me Cuba’s touristy sights—Varadero Beach, the Tropicana, the recently restored Old Havana area—they were equally eager to keep me away from the run-down neighborhoods.
It was the rainy season, and the streets were hard to photograph. I walked the city from end to end, for hours and hours each day, in search of images, drenched from the humidity, exhausted from the heat, and sick of hearing the flirtatious “ssssst” from men surprised to see a foreigner. I walked so much and spent so much time looking for the right light or the right angle of a shiny old American car in front of a decaying building that even my minders got bored with me and decided I wasn’t worth following around. For a few days, there wasn’t enough water for bathing, and soon I smelled from my long days of walking. I thought I might collapse from the heat. But as I roamed around the Cuban villages alone, camera in hand, I also felt satiated, at peace. I felt at home.