Cuban Stories

Early this year (2023) I received a message from my friend Jaime Permuth. I met Jaime years ago, when I took a month off work to do some photography workshops at the New York Film Academy and he was one of my instructors. Jaime was preparing to teach a workshop in Cuba together with Alex García, the founder and director of Cuba Workshops, and he asked me if I would be interested in participating. My answer was a variation on “is this a trick question”?

Growing up at the height of the Cold War, Cuba had loomed large in my imagination, both as a cautionary tale and a forbidden fruit.  And due to our six-decade-long economic embargo, traveling to Cuba requires US citizens to jump through some hoops. The Cuba Workshops, an activity sanctioned by the US government under the category of Support for the Cuban People, offered me the opportunity to visit the island. 

It was quite the experience.  Of course, I cannot claim more than a superficial understanding of Cuba after my one visit, but I now have something I did not have before: indelible images of a country and a people we should know better than we do. I captured some of those images with my camera. And I’m sharing some of them with you.