Those Who Have Stayed in Cuba’s Escambray Mountains
HAVANA TIMES — In the mountains of Cuba’s Escambray region remain people who have watched neighbors, relatives, and entire generations leave. Their homes remain as well, along with the animals, the footpaths worn open through constant use, and the traces of a way of life repeated over decades. Yet no one, or very few people, is documenting their lives or telling their stories.
What is happening not just in the towns of rural Cuba, but in its most remote hamlets? What is happening to these people now that they go for days at a time without transportation or electricity? What do they think about? What do they long for? What keeps them awake at night?
I visited the Escambray two years ago. Although I went mainly as a tourist, I got to know several families. We talked about the theft of crops and livestock, drinking water, pests, rainfall, middlemen, and the prices of agricultural products. These are people who place their love for their homeland above all the hardships they face.
Amid their daily work, advancing age, and the persistence of both natural and human cycles, life continues to find ways to endure. Yet there are no censuses, statistics, or surveys asking, for example, how many of them would move to the city or emigrate to another country if given the chance.
More than documenting a rural way of life, these photographs seek to draw attention to that other part of Cuba that is every bit as authentic—and as burdened by hardship—as its largest cities. In these remote communities coexist memories etched into people’s bodies, the architecture, the plants, and everyday objects, alongside the strategies that make it possible to sustain life in places shaped by scarcity and isolation.