Words for This Moment / Cuba, 2026

The project distances itself from simplified narratives of crisis to return to the human scale: those who live through it take the floor and participate in constructing their own representation.

Every photograph begins before the shutter is pressed. In this project, it begins when a person pauses for a few minutes to find the words that define this moment in their life.

Made in Havana last July, during a period of profound economic and social crisis marked by great uncertainty, Palabras para este momento brings together portraits of people who, before being photographed, are invited to pause, talk and, after a period of reflection, write on a black sign the words they want to use to name what they are experiencing. The project was developed in collaboration with journalist Liz Oliva Fernández, who conducted the conversations and interviews with the participants. They are not responding to a single question or reproducing a slogan. The only condition is that they write something honest about their lives and the moment they are going through. Each portrait becomes an act of self-representation: it preserves the moment when a person decides how they want to name their experience.

When a crisis becomes the dominant narrative of a country, people risk being reduced to categories, statistics or political positions. I am interested in turning our attention toward what those categories leave out: singular life stories and individual ways of naming the present. Portrait and word complete one another, constructing a more complex representation of each person.

The voices gathered in the series speak of loss, desire, fear, determination, love, faith, precarity and hope. They do not construct a common narrative about the present, nor do they seek to resolve it through a shared explanation. They coexist without becoming a single story, shifting the gaze from abstraction toward the concrete experience of an individual.

Rather than explaining Cuba, Palabras para este momento proposes a reading constructed from those who live this reality. Faced with the simplified narratives that are often imposed on a country in crisis, the project turns attention back toward what every generalization leaves out. Where larger narratives tend to homogenize, it insists on returning to the human scale: the irreducible experience of one person.