Internal courtyard, Palacio Cantero (Museo Historico Municipal)
It's amazing to how a photo can take you back to a particular time, a place. (Some would argue this there entire purpose, though I disagree.) When I snapped the above picture I was lying on the bed of our all pink and mint green room at a casa particular in Trinidad. We'd spent the morning and early afternoon touring the beautiful colonial city—a remnant of the sugar trade with cobblestone streets and peppy yellow and white painted Spanish buildings—and were ready to head out again after a quick bag drop-off. I sleepily listened as my husband chatted about dinner arrangements with our host. It struck me that the light coming through the acrid pink curtains was perfect, and that it would make a great black and white. So I clicked.
Later, we waxed philosophic with our gracious host on the virtues of Che Guevara over a dinner of pork and bean soup followed by local lobster: a splurge meal at our cook/host's urging before heading out for an evening of salsa (watching as opposed to dancing). He presented my husband with a Che T-shirt after discovering we were fans—a gift we did not take lightly as quality clothing was notoriously hard to come by in Cuba at the time. We received an emotional and heartfelt thanks for our tourism: he noted that Canadians had not abandoned Cuba during the embargo. It was one of those meals that you try to recreate it was so good; but we can never seem to get the beans just right. Then, we meandered through a not-so sleepy city at dusk, and closed the night watching Latinos from all over the Latin world swirl and twist their hips in a competition held on the cobblestones under the stars.
View of the city, Palacio Cantero
Through the same window on the next morning as we got up to depart, we heard the staticky voice of Fidel Castro in a rarely televised speech. Several older women (nearing the same age as Fidel himself) lovingly chortled that he looked near dead through their open windows across the street from one another, hair in colourful bandanas, large gold earrings jangling. They still clearly had affection for the man.
All of this still comes back to me from that rather quiet afternoon picture.