Earlier I would do that journey by bus. From the corner where I used to live to Centro Havana or sometimes to Old Havana. Or I would go in an old Ford from the fifties which would make the same run with four or five passengers each paying one peso. Since the early nineties I do this walking. The buses do not come by as often, neither do cars and the streets of Havana have become populated with cyclists and pedestrians.
The oil which formerly came from the Soviet Union is now evidently missing, that among many other scarcities brought on by the fall of the socialist countries and the economic blockade imposed on this island since more than thirty years ago.
Maybe this story had already started in the XIX century , with a long series of speeches proclaiming the island's uniqueness. (An island in politics as in it's geography) shouted the clergyman Felix Varela at the start of last century.
The streets have taken to darkness. At night, La Havana is a city in imbued with shadows. I walk, I have walked these streets a million times. And since my first trip in 1988, I am fascinated.
I'm a witness to a diversity of ceremonies that happen along these
streets, in these houses and which I pick up with my camera, in
silence.
Streets populated with people waiting. With music. With saints. With
secret rites. With syncretism, With Cubans which sell and tourists
that buy.
I find an airplane, abandoned in the midst of nowhere and they can't explain how it got there. They tell me there where no more spare parts. I see a shadow on a post which lasts only as long as I take to photograph it and which is the reflection of a game invented by children. And I walk, thinking of this country, of this island. Of Che Guevara, of Jose Marti. In Fidel, who is playing alone a match of chess at the club Capablanca.
In trying to decipher the intimate secrets of this city and its time, which are also my own.
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Sept 95.
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