In December 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced the restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba after more than fifty years of estrangement. Six months later, when these photographs were made, little had changed on the ground. The embassies would not reopen until July. Obama’s visit to the island was still nearly a year away. Travel and remittance rules had loosened, but the embargo remained in place, a decades-old constraint that had shaped nearly everything on the island, down to the paint on the walls and the parts under the hood of every car on the street. What had shifted was the expectation. An era had been declared over before it ended.
That May, Havana opened the 12th Biennial, Between the Idea and the Experience, the first since the announcement. Some two hundred artists from forty-four countries took part. Rather than concentrate the work in museums, the organizers pushed it into plazas, fortresses, neighborhoods and along the Malecón, with the stated intention of letting art move through the fabric of ordinary Cuban life. The city’s arts infrastructure was thin and strained under the attention, so artists built with what was already on hand and assembled an open-air museum out of it.
That method was not new to Havana. Making something usable out of available material is a long civic habit here, and Cubans have their own word for it, resolver, to work it out, to make do. The improvised part fitted to an engine that stopped being manufactured in 1959. The colonial mansion subdivided to house three families instead of one. The palm-thatch structure standing in for a pavilion. Grand facades eroding under salt air and decades of deferred repair, their futures seemingly clearer to visitors than to the people living behind them. Havana doesn’t wait for scarcity to end before it builds something out of it, and for a month in 2015 the Biennial gave that habit a name and a stage.
These eight photographs were made where the political and artistic transitions overlapped. A statue of Christ looks out over the harbor beneath a bruised sky. Straw-thatched umbrellas line a public beach in rows too considered to read as casual. A weathered door stands beside a rusted Castrol drum, its faded lettering reading like a shout of the name that had defined the island for half a century. Fishermen stand shoulder to shoulder along a seawall that was also, that month, a gallery. A narrow lane of mint-green tenements carries on undisturbed by the artists and cameras a few streets away. The work is observational rather than journalistic, patient and attentive to the light, color and texture of a city that had learned to endure rather than renew itself.
There is a difficulty in this that the photographs sit inside rather than resolve. Havana’s surfaces are a product of constraint rather than preservation, which means the appearance that draws a visitor and the conditions a resident lives with are not separate facts. Within eighteen months the embassies had reopened, a sitting American president had walked through Old Havana, and Fidel Castro was gone. The Biennial would not return for four years. What ended was not the city but the alignment: a brief interval in which a fifty-year condition was still fully in force and already understood to be over.
Van Urfalian grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from ArtCenter College of Design’s photography program in 1999. He has worked as a photographer, cinematographer and creative director for entertainment studios and global brands, building a career around the idea that a picture’s job is to tell a story. Havana Summer 2015 extends a story never told and still not finished.
Straw-thatched Beach
This is Resaca (“Undertow”), a 2015 installation by Arlés del Río for “Detrás del Muro” (“Behind the Wall”), a public art exhibition presented as part of the 12th Havana Biennial. Del Río—a self-taught artist born in Havana in 1975—has become one of Cuba’s most recognizable contemporary artists and is known for creating conceptual work from humble, everyday materials. For Resaca, he used tiki huts, palm trees, beach chairs, and sand to transform a stretch of the Malecón into a functioning public beach for roughly a month. Curated by Juan Delgado Calzadilla, “Detrás del Muro” brought together works by fifty-one Cuban and international artists along the Malecón. Resaca appeared near the U.S. Interests Section only weeks before diplomatic relations were restored and the building resumed operations as the U.S. Embassy. Against that moment of diplomatic change, the installation’s manufactured beach carried a political undertone: the inviting chairs faced a sea that had long represented both possibility and a border most Cubans could not freely cross.
Mint Tenements
Built for the city’s rising middle class during the 1940s and 1950s, the reinforced-concrete apartment blocks, with their cantilevered balconies stacked in uniform rows along a narrow service alley, are indicative of Havana’s mid-century housing boom rather than its colonial core. Six decades later, the paint has softened to mint, the wiring follows improvised paths, and iron security grates cover the ground-floor windows. Yet the buildings retain the rhythm of ordinary residential life: a bici-taxi waits at the mouth of the alley while neighbors converse on their walk home. This is a quieter Havana, largely absent from postcards—not a landmark, but a place people live.
Shoulder to Shoulder Along the Malecón
A row of men fishing along the same stretch of seawall, rods angled out toward open water, spaced almost evenly like figures in a frieze. For many Cubans, fishing here isn’t recreational. Private boats are tightly restricted, partly out of concern they could be used to reach Florida, leaving the seawall as one of the few readily accessible places to fish. Here, fishermen work with hand lines, improvised equipment, and buckets rather than boats or conventional tackle. Their catch supplements household diets strained by decades of scarcity. Seen from a distance, the scene reads as ritual: a line of solitary figures facing the same horizon, engaged in the same quiet, necessary work.
Classic Traffic
Two almendrones—vintage American sedans Cubans call “big almonds” for their rounded shape—roll down a street framed by nearly a century of Havana architecture. These cars have outlived the era that built them. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the U.S. embargo restricted access to American parts. Cuban mechanics kept the almendrones running through improvised repairs and components adapted from Soviet vehicles, while families passed the cars from one generation to the next. It was not until 2011 that Cuba began easing broader restrictions on private car sales, and newer vehicles remained beyond the reach of most Cubans. What appears to be a postcard of old Havana is instead a portrait of endurance—of machines kept moving through generations of ingenuity and necessity.
Christ Under a Bruised Sky
Officially known as El Cristo de La Habana—the Christ of Havana—the 20-meter monument was sculpted in Italy by Cuban artist Jilma Madera from 67 pieces of white Carrara marble. The project was commissioned as an act of faith and hope by Marta Fernández, wife of President Fulgencio Batista, after he survived a 1957 assassination attempt. The monument was inaugurated on December 25, 1958—just one week before Batista fled Cuba and his government collapsed. Jilma Madera left the statue’s eyes hollow, creating the impression that it watches the viewer from any position. Over the following decades, the monument survived at least three lightning strikes and remained largely inaccessible within a restricted military zone until the 1990s. It outlasted the regime that commissioned it and became one of Havana’s most enduring symbols.
Chaflán Corner Watcher
The woman in blue on the upper balcony is doing what women throughout this neighborhood do for hours at a time—standing at a railing and tracking the street below with more patience and consistency than any camera. In Havana’s older neighborhoods, these balconies form a kind of informal watch system: someone is almost always home, almost always at a window or railing, and very little happens on the block without being seen and, eventually, discussed. It’s a reflection of how these buildings are occupied today—grand single-family townhouses long since divided into apartments, with extended families and several generations sharing hallways, plumbing, and a collective eye on the corner. Laundry strung along the railings, plants crowding a windowsill, and the quiet routine of someone sitting and watching—daily life unfolds in plain view, one balcony at a time.
Hello, Havana Calling
A woman makes a call from one of ETECSA’s blue-shelled public payphones, a standard fixture across the island. In 2015, payphones remained a practical necessity for many Cubans because mobile service was still expensive relative to state salaries, even seven years after it was opened to ordinary citizens. That same year marked a shift in Cuba’s international communications. Since 1999, calls between Cuba and the United States had to be routed through third countries, reducing call quality and increasing costs. Direct telephone service was restored in March 2015 as part of the broader diplomatic thaw. Against this backdrop, a simple phone call like hers becomes a quiet symbol of Havana beginning to reconnect with its neighbor across the Florida Straits.
Castro!
Look closely at the barrel: it reads Castrol, not Castro. Castrol is a British motor-oil brand founded in 1899 by Charles “Cheers” Wakefield as CC Wakefield & Company. Its name derives from castor oil, an ingredient the company’s researchers added to help lubricants perform across a wider range of temperatures. Burman Oil acquired Castrol in 1966, and BP acquired Burmah-Castrol in 2000. A rusted Castrol drum in a Havana courtyard is less strange than it might seem. In a city shaped by decades of scarcity, imported machinery and containers were routinely salvaged and repurposed, often outlasting the supply chains that brought them to the island. Here, that history creates an accidental monument: a faded brand name easily mistaken for Castro.
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