Another vintage Cuba photograph culled from my collection of vintage Cuba-related images – this one depicting a 1941 wedding at San Juan de Letran, an ornate cathedral located in Havana’s Vedado district.
A curious point of fact about this vintage image – the fellow on the far-left of the photograph is/was the owner of the Havana shipyards in Casablanca. The same shipyards that sixty years later, under the “stewardship” of Castro Inc., would begin sending workers to Curacao for use in a virtual slave labor operation in order to help pay down debts the Castro-owned yard owed to the Curacao Drydock Company, which had entered into a botched joint venture with the de-facto Cuban government in the 1990s.
My question: if you were to show this photograph to your “average joe” and ask for their guess as to where it was taken, what type of response would you expect to receive?
5 thoughts on “From My Files”
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If it was here in L.A. I’d guess someplace fabulous and moneyed like the Biltmore Hotel. . .
Those poor suffering souls… If only they knew that their salvation would come in a short 18 years.
…
Marta,
That’s what gets me. The only Cuba I’ve ever known personnaly is the present. I have never quite been able to get my head around the fact that the island wasn’t a third-world country years ago. It just blows me away. These old images I discover from time-to-time just tend to leave me flabbergasted.
Best,
-AB
That’s one of the values of these old photographs – to show that Cuba was not the wretched, Third world country it has become. The photos from the 50s look exactly like the United States at that time – well, maybe with more palm trees.
juan
Anastasio –
In contrast, all my memories of the Cuba we came from are rich. Even the ones from our family farm. There was always abundance. That has always stayed with me.
Quizas pronto. . .
M