Havana’s Versatile Malecon Seawall
By El Estornudo – Photos: Camilo Ríos
HAVANA TIMES – For just over a year, photographer Camilo Ríos (1999) has been documenting in black and white film “the tragicomedy” of Havana’s Malecon.
The city’s maritime boundary as a wasteland of solitude, a springboard for modest joy, or an ideological gorge —between one extreme and another— where the masses rehearse the “perfect choreography.”
The versatile Malecon is perhaps a spin-off of the Sound & Colour series, where it seems that Havana is shown to us the day after the explosion of a bomb of lucidity. Now we witness the eve of that clear apocalypse.
“I analyze the variety of human-environment interaction in the Malecon strip between 16th and 23rd streets as a micro-reflection of the broader context of current Cuban society,” says the photographer.
“In my walks, I find absent subjects, lost within the physical space they know so well but which is rapidly transforming, cornered between a line of buildings that rise higher each day and the sea,” adds Ríos, paranoid. “Some face the wave of steel and concrete coming at them, others turn their backs, fixing their gazes on the distant blue horizon.”
Is the Malecon just a cursed frontier for the claustrophobic islander? Is it no longer the “great sofa” portrayed by Spaniard Juan Manuel Diaz Burgos still in the early nineties?
Is it a refuge or exposure, Havana’s Malecón?
It is both, and it is much more than that dichotomy, the author has supposedly come to tell us. But who can be sure? What is photography? Refuge or out in the open?
I have very many happy and fond memories of my many walks along the Malecon in all types of weather. Meeting and chatting to so many colourful and interesting characters, Also an excellent venue for photographing my interest in your local transport.