Overview
Reports of poverty and waves of refugees have given most Americans the impression that contemporary Cuba is paralyzed by Communist. austerity and drained by economic isolation. Yet in Cuba y Cuba, Ren Burri, a Swiss-born documentary photographer who has turned his lens on the island since the early 1960s, records a people emanating quiet pride even as they wait for change.A sequence of twelve black-and-white images depicts the confident years immediately following the 1959 revolution: cigar-smoking workers build fishing boats, and children play baseball in front of the National Cathedral. The lush, color-saturated urban landscapes that follow, created between 1984 and 1993, focus on the iconography of Cuba's military regime and the vitality of its street life. A uniformed soldier standing at a curb glances sharply down the street, a young woman dancing barefoot on a terrace strikes a statuelike pose, a boy in turquoise shorts tries out a yellow hula hoop.
Accompanied by an essay that clearly describes Cuba's current poverty and uncertainty but holds out the possibility of economic rebirth, and by poems that celebrate the beauty of the island, these striking pictures pay tribute to a people determined to meet the future with passion and equanimity.