Identidades in English No 5, Abril, 2015 | Page 17

Inequalities from Other
Havana postcards
Juan Antonio Madrazo Luna
National Coordinator, Citizens’ Committee for Racial Integration (CIR)
Havana, Cuba

travel agencies like San Cristóbal, publications, like Opus Habana, or tourist

M

y point of departure in this
incursion into the work of
photography is from my position as a citizen-activist. I confess that
my first physical contact with this deep
Havana unknown by many was from a
seat at the Chaplin Theater, in the no
longer very elegant neighborhood
known as El Vedado.

postcards with 3D images showing off
an imagined nation, Cuba, as a travel
destination. We are before a rejected
city, a city submerged not only by the
official narrative, but also by a social
imagery.
We have before us a view of a secret
Havana, the most battered, messiest
one, a Havana in which there is a high
degree of violence.Havana is an easy
metaphor for poverty; it is a city in
which indifference is no longer obscene.
This city that never sleeps, hosts modest
scandals and at the same time becomes
many cities. Many of us are ashamed to
look around because in this city awakens a world for which the political authorities have no answers, only commands and forceful actions. Five revolutionary decades have not sufficed to
normalize the dignity of housing and
deconstruct islands of poverty. Those
who live in the city are witnesses to this
cruel reality, which worsens every day
before our very eyes.

In some way, I decided to walk unknown distances within my own city
some time after seeing the Young
Filmmakers’ debut, and thanks to the
critical eye of young filmmaker Alina
Rodríguez and her documentary
Buscándote Havana [Searching for Havana].
Havana wants to be looked at carefully;
it has undergone different intense
changes in its limits over these difficult
years. Through these photographic images, I invite you to get close to the Havana that inhabits the neighborhoods,
and the bodies that wander through
them. I invite you to kiss the wounds of
a city marked by extreme inequality, to
peek into the worlds lost in Havana’s
geography.These pictures have little in
common with the images projected by

At first glance, some supportive visitors
seem to be gazing at a postcard of Kinshasa, an outlying neighborhood of Ma-

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