Havana: July, 1956
Above: Dad pauses for a cigarette in front of one of the beautiful mansions near El Lago, about 10km east of Vedado. This particular mansion would house Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the late-1960s. I visited this spot in January, 2018.
When Dad died in 2012 I inherited a large, deteriorating 48-can count Van Kamp’s pork and beans box. My fantasies of unlimited pork and beans feasts were short-lived, however. Instead of beans, the box was stuffed with old shoeboxes and crumpled envelopes, themselves full of slides and photographic negatives; well over 10,000 images in all.
From his late teenage years onward Dad had a camera handy, snapping photos of friends, relatives, and landscapes large and small. His photos were, even early on, taken with an eye toward narrative. Perhaps of equal importance, he had assiduously documented (in ball-point pen on the hundreds of negative sleeves and slide boxes) the names and dates of the people, places, and events his images captured. Thus, in the margin of one Kodachrome slide was written, “1956 Havana Airport, Alfredo Otero and Frank Mathias, 2 weeks before I met Florence”. Florence was Florence Duffy, the woman he would marry, my Mother.
Dad used his developed snapshots to populate over a dozen ‘family albums’, captioning the photos with threads of informative, often hilarious commentary. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these albums for instilling in me a sense of shared history, of being part of a larger story. Dad’s beautiful slides were an adjunct to the albums, pulled out of the closet for viewing when extended family visited. The assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins would gather for a slide show in our darkened living room. The adults would sit on the sofa and chairs, drinks in hand and cigarette smoke curling from ashtrays with beanbag bases, while the kids splayed on the carpet. A parade of images from our shared past would flash on-screen while the projector fan whirred amiably in the background.
Dad saved and identified all of his photographic negatives, a practice I’ve since learned was remarkably uncommon. He stored them all in the Van Kamp’s pork and beans box, accumulating more with each passing year. There they remained on a shelf in the basement next to the ping-pong table for nearly half-a-century. A time machine in a cardboard box.
Dad was a true historian. He worked as a history professor at the University of Dayton for three decades, but beyond his title he had a unique sensibility. He recognized that the ‘permanent’ backdrop of our lives fades with shocking swiftness. The events, places, and people populating our lives are ephemeral. Taking a moment to scrawl a name on the back of a photograph can rescue a person from complete obscurity.
Dad visited Cuba in July, 1956. Two weeks after he returned stateside he met my Mom. Though he had no inkling of this at the time, his Cuba trip was also his last moment of unencumbered bachelor freedom. The changes looming in his own life paled next to those in store for Cuban society. Cuba in 1956 was on the cusp of revolution and subsequent decades-long isolation. The very same airplane that flew Dad from Miami to Havana in July, 1956 would become, two-and-a-half years later, the setting for the first international hijacking in history, crashed by pro-Castro rebels in a forced landing at Nipe Bay that killed nearly all aboard.
Dad unwittingly, and vividly, captured the waning days of pre-Castro Cuba. His several dozen Kodachrome slides document a wide swath of Cuban society of the time; from the yachts, mansions, and resorts of the affluent to the obvious poverty endured by Dad’s musician friends and clearly visible in the streets and bayside slums of old Havana.
I marvel at the beauty of Cuba in these pictures. I marvel at the 1950’s cars, signs and attire, fixed in amber. The revolution imposed a fifty-year stasis on the island that has likely preserved many of these locales largely unchanged since Dad photographed them. The same can’t be said for the people. I wonder about how Dad’s friends weathered the decades of isolation and privation under Castro’s regime. What was life like for the ‘crippled’ son of Dad’s musician friend, who would be in his early-60’s now? Dad never had the chance to go back. I am returning to Cuba for my fourth trip next month, having had the incredible experience of “stepping into” some of the vistas in Dad’s decades-old Kodachromes. A direct result of first exploring the contents of that old box.