CUBA, UNSCRIPTED

Cuba, Unscripted is my photographic return to a Cuba I know intimately—a place where scarcity and decay exist alongside beauty, humor, friendship, and the small joys of everyday life.

CUBA, UNSCRIPTED
Beyond the postcard.

I know these streets.

I know the sound of a horse before I see it. The voice of a vendor stretching a word down the block. The smell of tobacco. The way laundry becomes part of the architecture. The way a bottle of rum can turn a piece of sidewalk into a bar.

I was born here.

So when I walk through Cuba with a camera, I am not discovering a foreign country. I am returning to a place that has always been part of me, even after I left.

But familiarity doesn't make everything easier to look at.

Some things I recognize immediately. Others make me stop. I find myself looking longer, trying to understand how the place I remember and the place in front of me can exist at the same time.

There is beauty here, but beauty can be deceptive. A colorful facade can hide a collapsing building. A familiar street can lead to an empty store. Behind the ordinary rituals of the day, there is a struggle that has become part of everyday life.

And still, life goes on.

People work. They repair what can be repaired, reuse what cannot be replaced, and find ways to make a day out of whatever it offers. There is ingenuity in that, but I don't want to turn hardship into a story about admirable resilience. People should not have to become symbols of strength simply because life has made things difficult.

What stays with me is the contradiction.

The weight of what is missing, alongside the persistence of what remains. The promises painted on walls, and the people who walk beneath them. The beauty of a place that is slowly falling apart. The ordinary moments that continue even when the circumstances surrounding them are anything but ordinary.

And then, sometimes, there is rum.

Two friends in the middle of the street.

No restaurant.
No reservation.
Just a bottle, a couple of glasses, and Happy Hour.

For a moment, nothing needs to be explained. There is a drink to share, a friend beside you, an afternoon unfolding. Life is happening—not as a statement about survival, not as proof that everything is fine, but simply because people are living it.

That is the Cuba I find hardest to photograph.

Not the ruins. Not the empty shelves. Not even the hunger.

The joy.

How do you photograph a moment of happiness without using it to soften the reality around it? How do you show hardship without allowing hardship to become the whole story? How do you photograph a place you love without turning it into a postcard?

I don't have an answer.

I only know that I cannot photograph Cuba as though I am seeing it for the first time. I carry my childhood here. I carry the decision to leave. I carry the distance between the country I remember and the one I see now.

And I carry the knowledge that no photograph, however beautiful or difficult, can tell the whole story of a place.

These photographs are not an attempt to explain Cuba. They are my way of looking at it again—without nostalgia, without romanticizing what is difficult, and without looking away from what is beautiful.

This is the Cuba I recognize.

The Cuba I left.
The Cuba that remained.
The Cuba that continues to surprise me.

Cuba, unscripted.