This book exists because Swiss winters are so difficult. Daniel and Kathrin are a couple, both photographers who live in Basel but who refuse to adhere to the rules of a thermometer which, with the precision of a Swiss watch, falls below zero each winter, on days of leather boots and hats. This is why they escape the season’s mandates each winter and seek out new lands that tempt them with exotic warmth. On these journeys, they have photographed Bangkok, Sri Lanka, Buenos Aires... their temporary winter refuges.
When these traveling photographers crossed paths with Argentine publisher Guido Indij, the trio came up with idea of making each of their “escapes” into a photography project. The goal was to turn the project into a book that would reflect their astonished, serialized, organized, European perspective.
CUBAnísimo is part of this adventure, a trip that required constructing a viewpoint that did not yet exist. A true challenge.
Many say that Cuba is an easy place to photograph; by merely focusing a camera on any spot across the island, a marvelous picture will result. Cuba, they say, yields only small photographic wonders. This is why it was such a challenge to photograph CUBAnísimo. Because it involved a process of approaching the their perspective through icons that eclipsed what one really wanted to see. The sand, the sea, the palm trees, the Afro-Cubans moving their rhythmic and muscular bodies… These were all true obstacles for the photographers, who had to lie in wait for minor details and major surprises, small pieces of the life they would discover on the island. The photographers did not feel as if they were the first to explore this land, and they put together a simple work plan, one that they had already applied in an almost surgical way to other cities: they set out to register apparently insignificant objects like mail boxes, sewer grates, telephones, windows, houses, traffic signs, cars and carts powered by humans, along with urban details like graffiti, portraits of daring revolutionaries… Later, each element was organized in a predetermined series...

The End of Innocence
There is nothing naïve about this book. The authors are familiar with the history of the country, its past and its present, but they avoid the redundant emphasis that has been adopted time and again, both before and after the Buena Vista Social Club. There is a common perspective of the revolution that is nearly pornographic, one that depicts victory, anxiety, the beauty of African-Cuban skin and which insists on the turquoise sea, the leafy palm trees, the sugar plantations, the rum, the cigars, and the mojitos of a country that has been swept away time and again by furious hurricanes. It has also been swept away by imperialism, which has condemned it to an obscene and inhumane economic blockade, one which determines its singular architecture along with the persistent will of Cubans to “solve things”, that is, to replace what is lacking. Bearing this load of flight, work and adventure, Kathrin and Daniel arrived to Cuba and began to scan the island, to photograph it in fragments like a puzzle, so that later, the readers who hold the book in their hands can reconstruct it (or their own version of it). The reader, starting with a small piece, can thus try to fill in and understand the whole picture, a Cuban city constructed hand over hand, generation by generation. This is a place where there is no existing agreement that ensures the survival of any public spaces. There is but one exception, a silent, tacit pact of survival among the city’s residents: life comes first.
Kathrin and Daniel are meticulous observers and they shoot their tiny Lumix cameras, pausing to capture the details of objects easy to overlook, those which the locals neglect out of habit, because they have grown accustomed to their mere presence. One notable example is the sewer grates. In Cuba, there are dozens of models of sewer grates; here, the word “serial” is somewhat of a misnomer because each sewer grate is unique, and thus the value of repeating objects that serve the same purpose reaches new heights. Each sewer grate (a serialized object since its origin) is different from the next. For this reason, the same object is photographed time and again, that is, different versions of the same object, countering any attempt at the homogeneity or precision of the Marxist-Leninist formula. And the result is a celebration of notable diversity.
Although these photographers are tourists, their approach to recording is similar to the fieldwork done by anthropologists. They register specific objects in what is also a specific moment, but are astute enough to give them a false sense of timelessness. Although Cuba was avant-garde in terms of literature, music and film after the Revolution, and although the Revolution allowed Cuba to provide state-of-the-art medical services and reach full literacy in a country that is part of a largely illiterate continent, it now suffers from a contemporary tension in which these modernist or pre-Pop objects cannot be recorded. The objects have been resignified by the passage of time and by the work of the Cuban people, who remain stubbornly out-of-focus in the photographs on the following pages.  Thanks to the photographers’ finesse in selecting their topics and subjects, the contemporaneity of CUBAnísimo is ensured. It is the aura that emanates from the photographs, that intangible, blurry sweat that first appeared in Cuba and then in Europe and then across the world, a mixture that is intoxicating and staggering, one that combines the desire for happiness and the frightening sensation of doubt as its main ingredients and which is sketching an outline of what may well be the end of the world. Or perhaps merely the end of an era in which happiness was a conceivable illusion.
Fragmentation is another way to narrate the rupture of all political paradigms. A free civil society forges its own path, regardless of the beloved but frozen portraits of the founding fathers. In a country of lethargy, of torrid heat that invades tropical cities, bricked-up or grill windows are a sign of the times. Flags achieve an illusion of movement through repetition. The people we don’t see in the photographs are also moving. Movement and uncertainty are constant, in spite of the deceptive calm expressed by those in the photographs.
CUBAnísimo could be taken as a book to simply leaf through, but that would be a mistake, a missed opportunity. Beyond what the images describe, they tell readers a story, giving them historical and political background. The pictures are taken on a socialist Caribbean island, and each photographed object bears the mark of the Cuban individual whose contact with the object allowed him or her to be free and clever enough to modify it, shaping the object to his or her needs. In other words, this Cuban has made the object useful in a certain way, albeit as mere decoration. This new object bears the origin of its recreation. For this reason, the concept of “made in” is particularly apt, given its dual meaning.
Cuba is an installation of memory and a monument to a life that is determined to continue.

The Essence of Color
The series of chairs, refrigerators, old portraits, neon lights that no longer blink, and bricked-up walls with grilles whose frozen art deco beauty denotes a time that is frozen but also advancing… These are all material goods that have not been replaced since the Revolution that took place more than 50 years ago. They are always the same, but they have been repainted, retouched, appropriated. The camera, however, cannot capture the other type of goods, the intangible ones, or that power which surrounds them: the actions of men and women who refuse to give up. Homeland or death is a revolutionary Cuban slogan that incites the people to resist, to survive on the island where they were born, a slogan which is captured in these objects, the testimony of lives that are lived, the lives of Cubans today. Right there, on the other side of the camera.
These series are successful at capturing an essential part of Cuban identity: its color. It is a color like no other. A color that is purely Cuban, as essential as the country’s sugar or tobacco. A spectrum of pastels: light blues, greens and pinks, pure abstraction, the seal that confirms the identity of Cuban cities. From the telephones to the reconstructed walls, from the traffic signs to the homemade mail boxes and the sky above the luxurious and moving cemetery of the Vedado habanero, this is the “Cuban spectrum” in its purest form, Cuba beyond the rusty marks of time, beyond the revolutionary graffiti, beyond the incredible human-powered transportation, beyond the faces of the country’s eternal leaders: Fidel, Martí, Camilo and Che, Che forever, Che above all the others. He was acclaimed in victory and for all eternity and never questioned after his treacherous assassination. The image of his face is never parodied; time and again, others try to emulate Korda’s original photograph of the revolutionary figure.
From the mythic city of Havana to the stunning Santiago de Cuba, from the fields of Holguín to Camaguey and Trinidad, our traveling photographers escape from the cold. And in this journey-flight, through the incessant click of the camera shutters, they have created a book that is unlike any other book that has been published about Cuba. It is a book that finally breaks with the stereotypes commonly used to underestimate a country which is depicted as a land of prostitutes and old bureaucrats; defeated men and women without passports or cell phones, and the slowest, most expensive Internet connections in the world. In other cases, it is presented as the meta-island of bloggers who share their vision of the other “real” island with the world, that island that is smothering them but which they don’t want to abandon.

In its frozen gaps, CUBAnísimo speaks of a country in movement, one that aspires to survival, a country that constructs a monumental visual space from everyday life, one that says: “I don’t know how we get by,” “We are still here in spite of everything”, “They will not get past us,” and above all, “We will overcome because we already have.” It tells us more than any individual portrait could of the insistent and invincible desire to live that more than ten million Cubans silently foster in spite of their apparent calm, tells us of how they live their life in their own way and do not remain passive when confronted with the old order. Even within each series, every part, every object is slightly different, showing how behind each object lies a man or a woman who wants to set him or herself apart. There is a civil society that is present here, one that says “That’s enough.” Here and now, with the Malecón and the sea off-camera.

Cristina Civale

ISBN: 978-950-889-223-2