Jeweler David Balogh buying jewels from Cuban refugees. (Photo by Michael Rougier/Time Life Pictures

Once in a while I’ll log into any one of a number of online photojournalism archives – Getty, Magnum, Life – in search of images depicting pre-Castro Cuba. The research is done in a bid to understand the complete disconnect I feel from the Cuba that once was. The only Pearl of the Antilles I’ve ever known is the one of the last half century – that is to say, the impoverished third-world nation that has been used as a pawn by both the Soviets and now the Venezuelans. The contrast between the Cuba of yesterday and that of today is so stark, so complete, that photos of the Malecon aglow with neon light and flashy chrome-covered cars is almost incomprehensible to me. One of my uncles once attempted to explain to me how that contrast has functioned to keep him from “going back.”

“Imagine your life here in the United States, as it is right now. You have a comfortable, middle-class life, a car, a television, a college degree – all the things most Americans take for granted. You’re not wealthy but you’re doing just fine.

Now imagine if one day the government shifted drastically and you were forced to leave this land, thinking all-the-while that you’d be back within a few months. The years go by and you watch that developed nation in which you’d lived for so long transform into an underdeveloped country where poverty is the norm, development has completely halted, information is strictly controlled by the state and many activists around the globe applaud it. It’s just too much to process, let alone bear.”

To give you an understanding of what I mean, dig through some of your old family photos from Cuba. Try to find one that has been marked with a street corner perhaps. Now log on to flickr and see if you can’t find a present-day image of that very site. The change is quite frankly, terrifying.

Yesterday afternoon I stumbled upon a photograph that got me thinking about just how far the island has fallen. The caption reads: “Jeweler David Balogh buying jewels from Cuban refugees.” It’s dated to March of 1961 and can be found in the online archives of Life Magazine.

What immediately struck me was a feeling of “My God, Cubans wore jewelry. They actually bought jewelry!” That feeling might seem a bit odd to some of the older readers and contributors here at Babalu but it’s representative of something – the fact that Cuba was in many respects, just the same as any other developed nation many decades ago. When you delve further into this sort of thought you quickly realize that in a span of only about sixty years, Cuba went from being an underdeveloped third world colony, to a prosperous “first” world nation, then back to a third world colony. All this in less than a century.

Those who supported Fidel in the “beginning” never thought Cuba would turn out like it has. The island had experienced any number of revolutions and “golpes de estado.” Most probably thought the situation surrounding the “barbudos” would be no different – “just another shift in government that won’t alter the course ship too much.” And yet it has, and I’m sitting here looking at photographs on an online archive, attempting to reconcile what once was with what now is.