Now Featuring Small-batch, Artisanal Photography!
the press building in bucharest, romania – today known as the house of the free press, or casa presei libere – was the home of romania’s communist era newspaper. presently it contains the offices of a variety of print media and social media organizations, small internet companies, at least one fashion atelier, and a lot of empty space.
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in viñales, we visited a tobacco plantation one day and a cigar factory the next.
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| the tobacco barn | the farmers hang the leaves to dry them | tobacco seeds are very small |
the process for rolling cigars is fairly straightforward: cut a leave to size, put other dried leaves into it, roll it, glue the edges down with a flavored glue, wrap it in another leaf, trim the ends – done.
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it all looks very artisanal and romantic, but when you go to the factory, you can see that the work is a little more monotonous. what we saw were rows of women stripping the bitter-tasting stems out of the tobacco leaves while a forewoman at the front read articles to them out of the party’s newspaper, granma. some of the women looked as weathered as the leaves themselves. (the men in the factory for the most part did the heavy lifting.)
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next: some arty black-and-white photos
one of our projects involved a visit to an apartment building known as a solár. soláres are buildings that were owned by a single family before the revolution, that were then taken over by the state and split up into apartments. the state provides the soláres to the residents for free: free of rent and, apparently, largely free of maintenance except for what the residents do themselves.
the solár that we visited, on calle san ignácio, had been owned by a member of the aristocracy, the duque de pinar del rio. the duque’s slaves and servants moved in after the revolution, and their descendants still live there.
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in addition to the soláres, there are regular apartment buildings, also owned by the state. while in the san ignácio building, i met a woman named zoraida who had recently moved out of her apartment because the ceiling had collapsed. she gave me a copy of an inspection notice from the city’s housing agency, dated december 2013, which recommended that the units on the second floor of the building be demolished because they were structurally unsound. the order was later extended to the entire building, but before any work commenced, her bathroom ceiling fell in while her grandchild was in the bath. the baby died, and the remaining 14 (!) members of the family relocated from their two-bedroom apartment to an empty industrial building that they found with their friends’ help.
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| kitchen area | part of the sleeping area | zoraida and two of her children |
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| zoraida’s daughter shows a photo of the child who died in the roof collapse | zoraida’s sewing machine. she works as a tailor | zoraida shows an example of her work | in a letter to the city asking for help that she wrote prior to the ceiling collapse, zoraida reminded the authorities that she was a revolutionary in obedience to Fidel and Raúl |
subsequently, i visited her old building and was invited in by some residents who showed me their apartment and zoraida’s next door. with my rusty spanish, i couldn’t understand all the details they shared, but i understood two things: they were at pains to say that the state did provide them help in many ways; nonetheless, as regarded their housing, they knew that their building was in bad shape.
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next: cigars!
on an earlier trip to cuba a few years ago, our group leaders met a transvestite called barbara, with whom they developed some kind of a relationship. during this visit, they thought they saw her on the street, and – if i understand the story they told us correctly – their conversation went something like this:
group leaders: “barbara?”
transvestite: “cerveza?“
apparently, it wasn’t barbara, but rather a transvestite who called herself yalorde. in short order, thatcher and kirsten arranged with yalorde for us to come photograph her and her friends – in exchange for beer and money – so we could study how to work with natural lighting.
one day before we were scheduled to go to yalorde’s apartment as a group, a few of us went down to check out the lighting and take a few practice shots.
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yalorde (in and then out of the magenta shirt) was the queen bee, and very dramatic, but also very much in charge. raquel (left) and aruaca (right; i can’t vouch for the spelling) were far more quiet. when it came time for the scheduled photo shoot, however, they all “brought it.” tyra banks would have been impressed.
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 Granted, it wasn’t always pretty. |
after the shoot, we were invited to the drag show, and then it was out to the street to get us cabs. a typical thursday in havana.
next: housing
recently, i visited cuba with a group of photographers. with more than 3,000 photos to review, it will take me a while to complete my blog posts on this trip, and longer if i want to actually write something perceptive about the experience …
the travel restrictions are still in place, so we were there on a general religious license, which required us to visit churches and charities as part of our activities. i was eager to go, because i wanted to see cuba before the travel restrictions are lifted and planeloads of american tourists overrun the island. this seems to be a common theme, as this article notes: “we want to see the island before we ourselves can get there to ruin it.”
there already is a flourishing tourist industry in havana, however, catering to the rest of the world (as well as to the americans who have been willing all along to visit the country illegally; the cubans won’t stamp your passport if you don’t want them to). our group leaders, who had been to cuba a few years earlier, noted how many more private rental rooms, restaurants, and small businesses – for instance, people selling coffee out of their apartments – there now were as a result of the reforms that raul castro put into place since becoming president.
first, let’s get the clichés out of the way. even though there are new or relatively new cars on the road, there still are lots of the 1950s american automobiles in service. many, but not all of them, have been spruced up and restored to serve as expensive tourist taxis (presumably through money sent by family in the states – everyone seems to have a brother in miami).
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similar changes are visible in the architecture. the capitol building (in the first photo above) is undergoing renovation, as are many of the buildings in the center that will cater to tourists. in comparison – as i’ll describe in a later blog posting – the buildings housing ordinary cubans are still pretty decrepit.
there seems to be a clear divide between the havana that serves tourists, and the havana that doesn’t. walking just a little off the main tourist drag, one can see plenty of reminders that la revolución sigue – the revolution continues – despite the onslaught of capitalism.
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nonetheless, it’s clear that the u.s. is very popular among la gente. a priest we met told us that, prior to the revolution, cubans thought of themselves as spanish or (u.s.) american. it was the castro government that tried to reoriente cuba alongside the downtrodden countries of latin america and against the northern capitalists. however, it doesn’t seem to have fully worked. every day, at least two different people stopped me on the street to ask me where i was from and to engage in conversation. although sometimes it was just to tout a local restaurant, more often it was to talk about u.s.-cuban relations and to praise obama. and the explosion of small-scale private enterprise is a strong indicator of the direction the country would go if given the chance.
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there is a great deal more to show and say, so stay tuned.
the duomo in siena … words don’t really describe it.
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the cathedral was built between 1215 and 1263 using black and white marble, black and white being the colors of siena. the amazing walls and ceilings and the illustrated music manuscripts are from the adjoining piccolomini library; the frescoes tell the story of cardinal eneo silvio piccolomini of siena, who became pope pius ii (and was the uncle of pope pius iii), and the books are from his collection. click on any photo to enlarge it.
in tuscany, at the natural history museum, there is a collection of anatomical waxes. i quote directly from the placard at the museum:
unique in the world for the quantity and beauty of its pieces, this collection was the inspiration of the grand duke peter leopold of lorraine and felice fontana, the first director of the museum, who conceived it as a means of teaching anatomy without directly observing a corpse. it consists of more than 1400 pieces, done between 1771 and the second half of the 1800’s, contained in 550 showcases presently on display in 9 rooms.
enjoy, although possibly not immediately after eating.
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we came across a few abandoned villages during our drive through southern cyprus. sometimes, a village has been abandoned because an earthquake or water problem rendered it unlivable; however, it may be the case that a village was abandoned because it had been a turkish-cypriot village before the turkish invasion, and the residents left it for safety in the north.
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dams are impressive pieces of architecture. when i was in albania, i photographed the vau i dejës dam for a friend who was doing some architectural work for the electric company (including a few pictures with my 6×6 camera):
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so here have the asprokremmos dam, an earthen dam built from 1978 to 1982. stones on the embankment, a huge concrete overflow reservoir, and a capacity of 51 million cubic meters of water …
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… and below it all – in case the dang fails – a row of beehives to protect the buildings on the coast from the onslaught of water.
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we decided to visit the church and catacombs of agia solomoni, which was located relatively close to our hotel. agia solomoni (saint solomoni) was an early christian who took refuge in a cave to escape persecution by the romans. when the romans located her hiding place, they walled her up inside, condemning her to a long and painful death; however, when the cave was opened up 200 years later, she walked out alive. so the legend goes.
amazingly, there is not a wikipedia entry on this.
as is typical, there was a only a small sign pointing us toward the site, so we parked and trudged up a hill to the only structure we could see up there. it turned out to be some kind of shed, but there was a staircase cut through rock leading underground, so down we went. we were underwhelmed by what we found:
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sure, interesting, but a holy shrine? not so much, especially if the mattress and discarded beer cans were anything to judge it by.
we spied another way out and scrambled up, thinking maybe we somehow came in the wrong way, and we did find a nondescript chapel-like room further along the side of the hill, yet – curiouser and curiouser – the exit led onto someone’s junk-filled backyard.
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“okay,” we decided, “this is just some inexplicably bad tourist attraction, like you read about in inexplicably bad tourist attractions magazine,” and we went back to the car. however, as we drove back onto the main road, we saw a chestnut tree with ribbons tied onto its branches for good luck, and a neat set of stairs leading downward, and we realized that this was the entry to the church and catacombs, and the other place we’d been exploring was just a dirty hole in the ground.
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