(New) Cuba Photos

[jake]

All scanned and ready for viewing. Click the photo below for the complete tour. I tried to type up some brief notes to make things less of a mystery, but let me know if you have any questions. All shot with a Leica + 28mm lens + Ektachrome 100Gx.



Thanks for looking!

[martolod]

wow.
what an eye opener.
great series. thanks for sharing

[LarryD]

Wonderful. Too bad it will all be gone in a few years when the American money and imports roll in.

[OpenWater]

These are fascinating.  Wonderful work with one camera and one lens, by the way.  I gotta go.

[jake]

Thanks. Cuba seemed like it was pretty flashy back in the 1950's, but you can also tell that there was a huge income gap in the country. The government isn't my choice of a free and fair system, but they have mashed everyone down to approximately the same economic strata.

When you fly out of Jose Marti airport, you can look down on the villas of Fidel et al in the western suburbs of Havana. What is surprising is that even those guys seem to be living reasonably moderately by totalitarian government standards. I'd like to see some bank account numbers though.

From what I understand, US corporate agriculture is pushing the strongest for normalization. Great farm land, cheap labor, and close proximity to a major market - us. Hopefully the Cubans will be strong enough and smart enough to keep what they want as is and only modernize what they don't or what they need.

Infrastructure is the big limitation - few good roads in the country. And as our guide aptly pointed out, if the doors for travel to Cuba were opened by the United States tomorrow, there isn't a sewage treatment plant in Cuba that could handle the volume of what would come afterwards. They need to do a little prep work before everyone can come and visit.

[Mark B.]

Wonderful photos.  Thanks!

[KirkT]

Man, if they open up those doors the US will take that place over.  We'll turn it into Cuba Disney.  We'll bring back some of that culture in the form of restaurants and bars which will become so successful that eventually we'll export their "culture" back to them and kill their real restaurants and bars and replace it with our interpretation.

Like our Irish pubs.

[Mike Kovacs]

What I like about Cuba is its one of the last places on earth with no chain stores, no Mc Restaurants, no big box

[JRJacobs]

Wonderful - just watched it all as a slideshow.

What I love most is that it seems both dilapidated and charming at the same time.  I too would like to see it before it gets "gentrified", but if not, your photos seem to capture it well.

BTW - those crabs made me hungry!

[Tom Hildreth]

Great show, Jake. Thanks for posting these. Smart combination of camera and lens, too!

[jake]

Thanks again. I like working with one camera - one lens. Especially since I also usually have a pair of 10x40 binoculars around my neck.

Tom - did you see that I photographed Cuban trains? Or at least tried to.

The crabs are evidently semi-toxic! Not so good to eat. Here is a slightly better summary (and photo) of the phenomenon. At the apex of the migration, the roads stink like, well like crab left out in the sun, and the shells shred car tires.

Hard to say how Cubans feel about not having some of the consumerist aspects of our countries available to them. Obviously they are being short changed in terms of choices and that makes daily parts of their lives a lot more of a PITA. I am sure they'd love to just get on a bus, go to the grocery, get what they need (not what's there) and come home to find the air conditioning & refrigerator running, electricity on and hot water in the tap.

I only hope that if there is a normalization of relations between the two countries that the transition can be handled responsibly by both sides. Why I even think this is possible given the experience of Eastern Europe, I know not. Except that there does seem to be something different about Cubans. They are proud, gracious and have no inferiority complex. After all, whatever they have now they basically built themselves once the Soviets "disappeared", as our guide liked to say.

After 50 years though, I think while we can offer a bit of advice about what to think hard about for the future, we owe it to them to let them make their own choices once they have the opportunity to actually make their own choices. A lot has to happen though between now and then.

[martolod]

the crabs looked like blue swimmer crabs.or at least similar.
we have them here but i have never seen them in such concentrations.
ours are delicious and sweet though. i used to snorkel for them in about 12' of water out the front of the house i used to live in when living in the country.
along with abalone and scallops ,
but that was before i got myself steve irwined and my wife banned me from going into the sea again.....

[Santiago Montenegro]

Thanks for sharing, Jorn. I have an itch for traveling to Cuba, but Gaby does not want to, and in many ways it seems to be so similar to my home country that the expense could be unjustified.

[jamesmck]

Nice travelogue, Jorn.  One camera, one lens, one film.  I like that.

James

[jake]

Santiago - you and Gabi should definitely go. Especially if you like dancing all night. I don't dance, so all that possibility is totally wasted on me.

James - right up to the last minute before I left I had a digital camera in my bags as back up. Then I remembered I needed batteries and charger and....

I forgot I have two kinds of crabs in the photos.

First the yummy kind - definitely blue crab:



And now the not-so-yummy kind - land crab: