Abre Los Ojos
Waking early in Havana is not like being awake in any other part of the world. The 80 degree heat with 80% humidity, sweating unbearably, the elderly cuban woman yelling for Roberto, and the intense, early morning light reflecting off the Atlantic is like a surreal, yet tranquil dream. Rolling off the bed and opening the doors adjacent to the balcony, each morning begins as if I were a character in a Hemingway or a Hunter S. Thomspson novel.
My walks begin down a long, marbled-stained stairwell, in a five story building with a broken down elevator, into a hallway, and out through a hobbit-like door, only to be greeted by Pedro – a filthy, yet happy cuban dog, who waits for his morning biskit – then past the bus stop, across Linea Street, where I wait for a 1950’s Cuban-American taxi to the Malecon. The windows are rolled up, as raggaeton is blasting through the car, and every cuban is dancing. Barely breathing, I wait patiently as I arrive to Billy’s house for my morning coffee and conversations about art and cuban life. We begin our day, lost in conversation and forgotten by time, as the time on the clock is irrelevant – it becomes a feeling that leads us and pulls us away onto the street. We walk up San Nicolas and Animas Streets, through the local markets to see the happenings of early morning events. It takes an hour sometimes just to walk a block or two, as we greet our friends, neighbors, and people that we have previously photographed.
We continue to Galleano Street, also known as Avenue de Italia, which takes us past architectural delights of the America Building, a remnant of the Art Deco era, surviving and living through the Castro regime. The grandeur of this building is only rivaled by many other Art Deco buildings breathing and living in New York City.
As I continue walking, I drift into a dream of past thoughts, remembering how life once was, and all the simple pleasures. Summer days were always celebrated by the glory of the heat, and a sense of losing one’s self, experienced only once before in childhood when I was boy. My days of riding my bike through canyons, playing with snakes and coyotes, a freedom that I have longed for, yet thought was lost until my recent trips during the summer, wandering through the streets of Havana.
Hours were spent in these canyon playgrounds. Hours of my mother not knowing where I was, as there were no cell phones; it was a time when children could be children, and experience the world on their own terms and in their own way. The most dangerous element was perhaps a skunk or a rattlesnake, yet nature has a way of teaching you life’s lessons, like foreign travels and words in different languages.
Eventually, I step out of my dream, and each new step leads to an unpredictable moment; an unexpected photograph. A photographer, like myself, asks if I want my picture taken. As he is developing the negative, he begins to tell me that he has been photographing, in this spot, for 22 years. His fingernails are stained from years of exposure to the developer, the stop bath, and the fix. He photographs in the sweltering heat, day in and day out for $2.00 a photo with a camera that he has made to accommodate the trays of chemistry used to process the photographic paper. He has never taken the time to photograph for himself.
The neighborhoods, in the back alleys, past the Foridita, past the hotels, and the El Capitolio building, life exists far beyond the tourist trappings in the solares dwellings; construed as concurrent symbols of tropical lifestyles, who sought modest and cheap places to live amongst the mansions that once existed for the wealthy.
The solares are smaller communities that are stacked on top of one another; families living on top of families, sweltering in the heat and the intensity of the light. It is sometimes better to sit outside, on the street, under the shade, waiting for their neighbors to purchase their goods – avocados, mangos, coffee, batteries, and refilled lighters – than to sit in the humidity of their home.
A difficult existence, yet they’re happy, especially the children, playing their games of make of believe. Time is irrelevant as they fall asleep and awake in the heat, as their days are long and bright, and their nights are hot and humid. The only little bit of relief comes with the afternoon rains and drops of coffee to be shared in conversation.
Inside each solares is their oasis. A place to wait for visitors, moments that are overwhelmingly happy, yet the elation dissipates when they are left with a few items, kisses good bye, followed by, when will we see you again? The response is always next year, if not sooner.
There are always limitations, always feeling limited by something, mostly, time and money. Yet without these limitations, perhaps we would not appreciate what we have, or learn how to make do with what we have, or appreciate the small surprises that exist when knocking on one’s door. It was only yesterday when I photographed Enmanuel with the hatchling he was holding in his hand – another moment, another lucid dream. Walking into their home, I soon discovered a baby chicken as their new pet, another bird, and only to fear that at some point, it will become their dinner. A thought that seems unconceivable to some, but a reality that is experienced day in and day out. Leyanni gives the bird her love and affection as well as Hamilie, Enmanuel, and Kaylie.
And when you least expect it, there is the sweetness you find in life; the beautiful moments between the bitter and the sour. The moments when you take a sigh of relief and are able to finally breathe because you feel free once more. This sigh came in the joy of celebrating the new life of little Camilla. A beautiful baby girl, who was born only few days before she was photographed; a joyous moment and a person who will be cherished as she grows and is photographed through my lens.
The sweetness of the island is the youth, who help keep their mothers strong during a never ending revolution. Anaidis and Hermina live out their daily lives together, breathing the same air, cooking the same rice and beans, drinking the same flavor of coffee. Their dwelling is small and claustrophobic, a mere shack supported by their love, yet their happiness is found in the company of one another.
The off-shore, tropical breeze brings a fleeting sense of liberation, as the humidity fritters away. The light, the Atlantic, and the architecture of the revolution is mesmerizing and basking in glory, as the splendor of the sun offers a strange mix of things.
The design is lost to something that could have been more memorable. Something to honor tropical sunsets and offshore breezes. Something that embraces our humanity in the presence of nature, not to remind us that like the revolution, Castro still stands.
The here and now changes, forgetting the moments that preceded it before with the attraction of a beautiful woman and her kisses, and since the moment is photographed, I know it is real and not one of imagination.
The architecture of the revolution lingers in my mind, forever prominent, like the beautiful woman offering me her kisses; both are icons of the present, and perhaps foreshadowing of a future that lingers too much in my mind as the past isn’t yet a memory and the future remains an anxious dream.
Communist red and red underwear – the color of the passion of the revolution and the color of the passion of pleasure. The red that runs deep within our veins are like emblic medicines that have embraced many revolutions, and a medicine worn to embrace their bodies of quiet passions, which is all that remains in their possession.
. . . and to truly be free is to be oblivious.
. . . and to be oblivious is to enjoy the warmth of the Caribbean.
. . . and the warmth of the Caribbean is to wander in a land where our reflections are lost, yet our innocence remains seen in the eyes of a people waiting to be embraced.
As we embrace what is unseen in the ominous, and as we search for our luculent realities, these dreamlike moments are to be celebrated as they may never occur once more.
It is in the lucidity of reality that we see the beauty of being lost in the moment, being able to exist, free of thought and concern, of revolutions and opiates that seduce, and in the fleeting present, we can dance to celebrate who we are, or who we want to be.
We don’t want to be the iconic symbols and the broken structures that linger to be photographed in all their glory, yet they symbolic representations of the pride we have amidst our poverty.
. . . and our poverty lingers like the decay of our buildings, but this is our liberation.
A silent liberation, in the heat and in our humidity. We linger with one another in what seems to be our reality of perspicuous dreams.
Yet in our lucid realities, we have the time to wear our passion and to embrace our young with love and innocence.
We embrace our passions with colors of our Caribbean, tropical pleasures that you can taste in the sweetness of our fruit and the tranquility of your dreams.
New hopes arise, as the cranes settle the dust and as our facades change. In the midst of this change we will remain nonliteral as our literature is rewritten.
The literature that resides inside these buildings where we pray, despite the crumbling walls and broken structures, yet as long as these facades stand, so will our fictions of our past.
. . . and they will be written in our voice, in our spanish.
. . . and despite our anxious dreams, we look onward, past the horizon.
. . . yet even in chains, we Cubans still learn how to dance.
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Sunday, September 4th, 2011
