“As a photographer I am after that fragment of time when people’s gaze meets mine, when the lens reveals life beneath the exterior. As someone born and raised in Hawai’i, almost 5,000 miles away from ‘this other island’, I felt an immediate affinity with Cubans and with their native landscape. Moving beyond divisive ideologies and the limitations of language, my focus was the world of everyday citizens. More than thirty years ago, these journeys marked my reawakening as a photographer.” (Lorenzo DeStefano).
In the early 1990s, during Cuba’s severe economic crisis known as the ‘Special Period’, photographer Lorenzo DeStefano set out on a seven-day journey across the island in a battered 1952 Willys Jeep. Travelling with his friend and driver Juan de Mata Montero Reyes, he documented a country in crisis – and the everyday resilience of the people he encountered. Featuring 123 striking black-and-white photographs, this bilingual English and Spanish edition chronicles DeStefano’s rugged, breakdown-plagued trip – from remote villagers to urban dwellers, Santería priests to underage prostitutes. The text and photographs illuminate this complex place and its resilient people.
Lorenzo’s friendship with Juan de Mata is at the centre of this book. Covering a variety of subjects including cars, women, politics and human rights, their road trip cements a deep, cross-cultural friendship between two men of different generations. Expanding beyond the personal to a true panoramic of contemporary Cuban life, keeping one eye on the viewfinder and the other on the reality he is photographing, he powerfully conveys his impressions, his bewilderment, and his anxiety.