Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography

by Malcolm Daniel, Raquel Carrera

176 pages, Hardcover

Published October 29, 2024

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a succinct one-volume history of modern Cuba, disguised as an art exhibit. We travel from the portraits of the last Cubans born into slavery in the 1880s to the privations of the “Special Period,” and beyond: ghost-waves and Castro-shaped absences; ritual communism and occult queerness as x-ray visions shot on stolen hospital film; underbelly clubs and wheeled rocket-launchers; propaganda stamps; welders and farmers. Men are the mechanisms that make trains move. See their muscles taut like a nation ready to snap.

If you didn’t get the chance to see this exhibit at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, find a way to see it, or buy this book. It is unmissable, and deserves to be known as one of the great historic-photographic exhibitions of our time.