Marlene Marino

It's difficult to imagine but Havana was once ranked the most desirable first-world city to emigrate to. Today Cuba is known for its exiles and for those who drown at sea attempting to flee it. There are things that I know about Cuba from my family history. And of course there are many things I don't know. Those things give Cuba a mysterious presence.

My mother is a political refugee who came to America as the result of "Operation Peter Pan", a clandestine rescue mission mounted by the CIA and the Catholic church between 1960 and 1962. 14,000 Cuban middle-class childeren were flown out to Miami refugee camps in the middle of the night, because it was rumored that they were about to be sent to Russia for re-education. The artist Ana Mendieta was among them.

1961. These are some of the things I know. Cuban citizens were under surveillance and being incarcerated without trial or just cause. There were prison camps. People were being murdered. My family lived at the foot of the Sierra Maestra. My grandmother, a concert pianist, was the first to play the revolutionary anthem (The 26th of July) on her piano. Her brother took food to the rebels in the mountains. And my great-grandfather gave Fidel a Rolex. My 13-year old aunt brought home stacks of counter-revolutionary flyers and shoved them behind couch cushions moments before officials arrived to search the house. She planned to blow up the chemistry lab at her school in protest.

2008. I spent five weeks in Havana last summer. I wanted to preserve on film a sense of people's lives in this historical period of transition. I wanted the images to serve as a time-capsule for an unforseen future. I wanted to photograph everything that struck me- women's faces, couples kissing and making love, and people passionately discussing politics amongst collapsing Neoclassic architecture to the sound of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody. I wanted to retrace steps and make images that were musical and kinetic.

My grandmother once advised me to make friends with communists. This practice came in handy for her on a the trip she made to Havana just a few months after the revolution. She traveled to the city from the east in a frantic search for medicine for her ailing father. The Havana Libre Hotel, formerly the Havana Hilton, was in a state of chaos. Fidel opened its doors to peasants who, rumor had it, pulled toiltets out of the bathrooms to take home to their villages. It was a diaster. My grandmother was on a public phone in the hotel lobby trying to communicate with her family doctor, who was probably trying to flee the country, when the call was suddenly intercepted by an Aire Libre Mexico freedom fighter. He told her that the medicine would be delivered, in her name, to the Havana Libre later that same day.

Marlene Marino