A Family portrait

“A Family Portrait” was taken during my recent first trip to Cuba. I was invited to stay with a friend and his family in Fontanar and visit friends and relatives in the old town of Havana, Rio Verde and El Marti. My received vision of Cubans as a joyous and carefree people quickly disintegrated as I saw where and how they live. Their houses, dilapidated with no running sanitary water, are owned by the state. Their food rations constitute 25CL of oil and 1.5 kilos of rice a month and employment is incredibly high.

This was a first hand experience of an ideological regime failing its people and preventing them from evolving into a world a boat ride away. The contrast of our western comforts and the basic standard of Cuban living couldn’t have been made clearer. Yet the incredible sense of community as opposed to the individuality of western living couldn’t stop me from asking whether material poverty necessarily means unhappiness?