I’ve wanted to go to Cuba since I was a little boy. On our family trips to Florida to visit relatives, I’d tag along with my lounge lizard uncle to socialize with his Cuban musician friends. Thanks to my wife indulging my wanderlust and holding the fort down while I made good on a childhood promise to myself—I just returned from an 8-day trip to Havana and several cities in eastern Cuba.
As you may know, if you are an American and want to travel legally to Cuba, it’s not as straightforward as it perhaps should be (and I’ve been keeping tabs on the rules for a few decades now). So a few weeks after a quick discussion with my longtime friend (with whom I’ve recently been reacquainted), Dan Tamarkin, I went with Keith and Amy of Complete Cuba, Dan and four other travelers (most of group was photographically inclined). I’m not a group tour kind of person—I’m barely a person kind of person. But unless you have the time and patience to wade through arcane government protocols (I did not), working through a tour operator familiar with such rules and regulations is the way to go, perhaps especially for your first trip there. Dan, who had already been to Cuba twice with Complete Cuba, had nothing but good things to say. And after having gone myself, I have nothing but good things to say about Complete Cuba as well.
I’ve done a pass through my photographs and a couple hundred of them pull their weight in pixels. That pool will of course be further refined, but here’s a small taste. Two more not shown here (two of my favorites, actually) will be shown at the Rangefinder Gallery in Chicago along with photos from my traveling companions and past Complete Cuba Alums.
I’m not going to try and summarize Cuba in anything but images, nor will I pretend that my photographs capture anything other than the small slice of Cuba I happened to walk through. But here are a few armchair observations: