Cuba, Day 10

Roaming the Streets of Havana

Again, I am filling in the two missing days that got lost!

There is a lot of construction going on in Havana. New gas, water, and electrical lines are being laid, as shown here.

Buildings are being restored. Cobbled streets relaid. One has to watch where one steps.

Stacks of materials, mostly cobbles, line the erstwhile sidewalks, and we pick our way around them. It is good to see progress in this city, but we also look at it with mixed emotions.

We love that the beautiful old houses and buildings are being restored; it is excellent that the citizens will enjoy better utilities. But, we also love the peeling paint, faded colors, and textures that this city still provides.

When all is restored, will we be invited into people’s homes the way we are now? Will everyone be as open and welcoming? As it is, most people, including the workers, are friendly and don’t mind that we photograph them.

We visited a photography center that was quite interesting. Conceptual work was being shown. We didn’t photograph out of respect for the artists, but this stairway leading to the second-floor galleries held no such restrictions for me.

I loved the various angles. Blue on white. This is Cuban blue, by the way. Different from French blue or the blue found in the rest of the Caribbean.

We met two other photographers, quite well known in Cuba, and we really enjoyed our time studying their work and hearing about their projects.

Last week, we spent time with Nestor Marti, one of the better-known, professional photographers in Cuba. His exhibit of the Malecón was still up, and we wanted to show our group a different way of seeing. While our participants were asking questions about the various images, our photographer guide, never missing an opportunity, found a shot out the window.

Later, along the Prado, we enjoyed watching and photographing the old cars. Another one of the “dreamers'” cars flashed by. These cars are so little that the joke is in Cuba that their owners are dreamers … they dream they drive a real car!

Textures come in all flavors. Suspect wiring is all over the city, haphazardly strung along walls, poking out of cracks, yet somehow, it all works. Code is clearly not an issue here! And it seems to work, as we don’t see fire trucks racing around.

I love the CoCo taxis. They are so cute that I want to put one in my pocket! They are so named, because they look like a coconut. There are yellow ones for the tourists and darker ones for the locals such as this one patiently waiting by a door for its driver.

Next: Flamenco, Art, Baseball, Music, and Back to the Malecón (Because we lost a couple of days to the official mourning for Chavez, click on the link at the left to go directly to Day 11)

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