Havana Beyond Simply Seeing the Facts
Photo Feature by Ildi Tillmann
HAVANA TIMES – I am a photographer born and raised in Hungary. I have been living in the United States for the past twenty years.
In September of 2024, I spent three weeks in Havana, working on an independent photography project entitled Captured Landscapes: Cuba – New York. Once finished, the project will combine art-documentary photography with jazz music to talk about similarities in the nature of commercial and political propaganda and to artistically explore how they both distort real life and real human stories.
This was my first time going to Cuba, but I had been to the non-touristy Caribbean before, working in Haiti on an independent photography project between 2018-2020. As in Haiti, I wanted to avoid being seen and treated as a tourist in Cuba as much as it was possible. Speaking fluent Spanish, staying with acquaintances rather than at hotels went a long way in achieving that goal.
I went there to speak with people in their mother tongue, to hear their real stories, not just the ones they sell to the tourists. I went there to learn, and to understand what I saw informed as much by my Eastern European background as by my so-called formal knowledge about the Caribbean, attested to by an African Studies graduate degree earned in the United States.
I went there curious, carrying inside me family stories from the region where I was born, which, in many ways, reflect personal stories from Haiti and Cuba today. Stories of private lives in the context of a totalitarian political system, stories about the individual consequences of large-scale economic collapse. Stories of migration, of displacement, of the importance of family cohesion. I went there knowing how to find my way in a virulent informal economy where anyone under-informed is seen as legitimate prey.
Havana offered me more than a physical journey. I was taken by her fading beauty and by the art her people continuously created. And when I say art, I mean art, not entertainment as a stand-in for art, which is what I see everywhere in the United States. I was taken by the city’s potential and was devastated to see it being wasted. I was devastated to see the physical condition of the streets, the buildings, the people. Devastated to see the kind of poverty I never associated with Cuba. Devastated to understand that young people do not believe they could have a chance at a better life if they stayed there.
I understood those aspects of the city beyond simply seeing the facts. During the first few days I stayed in Reparto Güiteras, where the stores, the suspicion in certain peoples’ eyes, and the large, state-sponsored apartment buildings were an eerie throw-back to early 1960s Hungary. The second and third week I stayed close to Old Havana, the tourist area, which reminded me more of life in Eastern Europe in the very early 1990s, right after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
I tried to capture in my photos every aspect of what I saw. The beautiful, the sad, the collapsing, the glamorous, the resigned, the change-oriented, the hopeful, the cynical and the hopeless. I aspired to show it all, with human understanding, without judgement, which is not to say that I was in agreement with all that I saw. I hope to return and to continue taking pictures, to continue learning about life on the island with the help of people who live there. I would like to understand the Cuba hiding behind the travel advertising sites, or the Cuba created by rhetoric both on the left and the right of politics.
The selection of photographs below was chosen from my Havana photo gallery. To see the full gallery, please click here. To learn about the Captured Landscapes: Cuba – New York project, please click here. If you are interested in financially supporting that project, please get in touch with me through my website, to discuss fiscal sponsorship options. Certain contributions can qualify as tax deductible.
