Just back from Havana by Gary Indiana _ Cuba

Avenida 21 y, Malecón

text and photography by GARY INDIANA

 

Cuba is so far outside the world in many ways that when you make a Cuban friend, you find that much of what you normally talk about with friends is quite outside his or her frame of reference. This is a country where a park in the capital is named after John Lennon, but The Beatles’ music was never allowed to be played on the radio. Most of the movies, books, recordings, and television shows — as well as events of the passing day — that you may recall are either completely unknown here or understood through the oblique filter of the country’s only newspaper or the grimly cheerful, xenophobic news reporting of Cuban TV.

Information does reach this place in random droplets. People see the life that’s lived elsewhere in the Brazilian telenovelas everyone’s…