I
I can hear the small stones falling because I am behind, they sound like the agitated tail of a rattlesnake…
In blue jeans and a farmer’s shirt, the Cuban photographer Leandro Feal is climbing a staircase. The steps, though made of concrete, give way under his feet. They creak and drop small stones because it’s the staircase of one of those buildings in Old Havana that stands only by the grace of God. A building located a few meters from the luxurious Grand Packard Hotel, with its glittering black glass screens. This is not Feal’s first time in this building. He has been here before. Specifically to the top floor, where he rented a spot with magnificent views: all of Paseo del Prado! From the first bronze lions to that statue of the poet Juan Clemente Zenea gazing at the sea. The perfect window for a local photographer, not accredited for the fashion show held in Havana by the French fashion house Chanel, to photograph the German designer Karl Lagerfeld and those models who seemed inspired by Tamara de Lempicka, with their mother-of-pearl cheekbones and threatening hips, with their long eyelashes and wind-swept Chanel-model hair. The perfect window for a photographer not accredited for the show, which presented the 2016-2017 Cruise collection of the French brand, to document the significance of that luxury runway in a poor country like Cuba, in a country that was “thawing.” The political metaphor of that moment, flash, the faces of the “pharmacoporn” industry, flash, the possibility of change on the island, flash…
All that, all that would be seen through the window.
Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.
If he turned around, if he looked inside, he would see a half-finished kitchen counter with barely any tiles, a bed, and a small television. The home of a Cuban woman and her daughter, who allowed him to take the photographs, renting him their only window.
We reach the top floor. The small stones stop falling. And Leandro, with his soft voice of an educated boy, of a boy who studied in art schools and has seen the world with his green eyes, with the practiced touch of someone who knows what he wants, says to a woman peeking through the door:
—Don’t you remember me…?
—And he smiles at her. The woman, bluntly, says no. No. She keeps looking at him coldly.
Leandro insists, with an even softer voice. —I took some photos here. Years ago…
The woman’s dull eyes begin to shine and, as she opens the gate, she says, “Oh, yes, of course…,” as if remembering: “Of course…, you came to take photos with another young man.” (She refers to the Cuban photographer Arien Chang). “Right…,” continues the woman. “The thing is, now you look like a foreigner, and you’ve gained weight… But you can come in, go ahead.”
“If you had told me…,” the woman says as she walks down a dark hallway. “If you had told me, I would have cleaned a bit.”
Inside is the woman’s teenage daughter. They invite us to sit on the only furniture there. Two small armchairs. They remember that day when Leandro came almost ten years ago. They laugh. The woman blurts out: “What are you doing here in Cuba?” She makes that Cuban, neighborhood grimace, which consists of puckering the lips forward and tilting the head.
The police had cordoned off the street and Leandro was not accredited as a photographer for the show, so he thought about how to get those photos, how… He wandered around the area days before trying to rent a space that would allow him to do so. It had to be a space with a good view, of course. And early on, he was at the woman’s house, who accepted what Leandro proposed: to rent her window, to wait there until the time of the show. So, he waited for the runway until night, like those National Geographic photographers who watch from their tents all day until a fox, a wolf, passes by.
Although he thought the low angle would not be optimal, since the accredited photographers would have all the close-ups and American shots, he admits that his photos of the show are unlike any others: they are taken from above, revealing another interpretation of the show. The interpretation of the unaccredited photographer, who does not have the privileges of the foreign press; the interpretation of “stolen” photos, almost paparazzi-like.
They are the photos he waited the longest for in his life. They belong to his series “From Reform to Counter-Reform” (2016), in which Feal discovers the ball of implausible mirrors that make up Cuban society and where both the face of Tilda Swinton and that of Nicolás Maduro appear, the Chanel supermodels, helicopters against the Havana sky… All so surreal, one could say, although talking about surrealism in Cuba is already redundant. And that series, those photos, were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in 2018. And today they belong to its collection.
II
Leandro Feal was born in Old Havana, in the Belén neighborhood. He grew up on the fifth floor of a building “with spectacular views of Havana: the Capitol and the Morro,” where he lived with his mother and an uncle who was a painter. His mother was a singer and actress; in the son’s voice: “an artist.” The mother had not been able to study in art schools “due to bureaucratic problems, because her parents didn’t take her”; so she made sure her son did. She did take Leandro to study art. He studied guitar and painting. “She raised me to be an artist,” he says. “At home, they gave me all the support. They took me to the House of Culture, they encouraged me. I stole oils from my uncle to paint; if I wanted to make an installation in the living room, my mom would allow it.”
I ask him how he found Havana upon his return because Leandro lives in Europe most of the time. I ask him in his Central Havana living room on San Rafael street, sitting on a designer sofa, listening to the street voices rising up to his Art Nouveau balcony, the balcony of the house that he says he acquired thanks to having lived in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. The voices that rise, intertwining with the sun rays falling into the living room, sell white cheese, sell nylon bags, complain that there’s a one-meter-high garbage dump on the corner…
“Havana is more on fire… Whenever someone comes back, that’s the question friends living outside the island ask. It’s also the question I ask my friends when they’re in Cuba. Right now, what you see on social media is terrible, but you have to be on the ground. As Iván de la Nuez points out, ‘what you see from the outside is an amplified reality against a parallel reality that is the state’s.’ That’s Iván’s thesis. So, there’s a gap that you can’t fully process until you set foot there. I’m currently in the process of understanding what’s going on. How did I find the country? It’s something I’ve written to several friends…
For example, a few days ago, I wrote this message to the artist Hamlet Lavastida, my friend:
Hamlet, whenever I come back, I have mixed feelings, it looks more and more like the third world. The adaptation process is a bit difficult, there’s more garbage on the streets. All the young people are planning their escape. However, it’s a place where art flourishes like weeds. I’m getting to know the next generation of artists, and there are some very interesting things. That gives me hope.”
III
In the early 2000s, Gerardo, Leandro Feal’s maternal uncle, took him to the painting school at 23 and C, in El Vedado. An experimental school of plastic arts, where he went every day to receive sculpture, painting, and drawing classes for only 50 Cuban pesos a month. Then, in 2002, Leandro entered the San Alejandro Academy of Arts. At that time, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, whom he recognizes as a teacher and role model, had opened her legendary Cátedra de Arte de Conducta at ISA (University of the Arts of Cuba). According to Leandro, that space “had the latest ideas in contemporary art.” It explained that “working with the physical body of the artist was something already surpassed, undressing in a gallery had been done sixty years ago. She proposed that the artist work more with their behavior, their social body, which was more interesting than their physical body. That, of course, generated a school.”
Leandro attended that school as an auditor. “It was extraordinary because Tania had a program to bring artists and curators to Havana. It was done at her house, although it belonged to ISA, which allowed mobility and diversity in the group. There were all kinds of people-mixing; national artists joined international ones, lawyers, theater directors came in to give workshops… Tania expanded our general idea of disciplines that interconnected with what we were trying to do. I officially entered the ‘Cátedra’ in my third year at San Alejandro.
There, I coincided with ISA students. That’s why when I entered ISA, I felt at home. I didn’t finish university. I went to Spain with the girlfriend I had at the time, named Gema, and lived with her for three years in Madrid. The relationship didn’t last because she didn’t understand that I was an artist. She told me: ‘Here you have to work, this isn’t Cuba.’”
So, Leandro joined cleaning teams and covered shifts; polished floors, cleaned windows at the Punto Roma store… Then, he started working at a photo store with his friend Javier Caso, and there he bought his favorite camera, the Canon 5D Mark II.
“It’s the camera I like the most because it was one of the first photo cameras that could make videos. It was very versatile, it cost two thousand euros, so I had to save up, but I bought it.”
Leandro took photos of events, press, but the schedules clashed with those at the photo store, and since his partner didn’t want him to be freelance, they broke up. So, he left the photo store. He started photographing products for shoe stores in Madrid and ended up moving with a friend to Barcelona.
In Cuba, Leandro had wanted to portray his generation from the inside, to be “a participant observer,” and had been one of the photographers of the band Porno para Ricardo.
“I was a kid with a Nikon FM2 camera shooting on film. I liked the night a lot, not using a tripod, and I walked around with a roll of 100 ASA, expired. I took photos with expired rolls, and I realized in the process that it distinguished my work. From those years are my series ‘Trying to Live with Swing’ and ‘With Ham, Lettuce, and Garden Peas’, the latter with a 19-millimeter lens. Over time I narrowed it down, from ultra-wide-angle, those photos are almost all indoors, and in Almost Blue, I moved to a 35-millimeter. Then I moved to a 50-millimeter, like the one used by Cartier-Bresson, which is a difficult lens to master, very close to what the eye sees, and I spent a lot of time with that lens.”
IV
If you ask Feal what the themes of his work are, he says the night, the party. “I feel that I belong to a tradition of documentary cinema from the sixties, of that avant-garde photography.” He adds these themes: “My generation of artists, Havana, cultural resistance, the geek, the alternative, certain spaces of freedom in Cuba.”
If you ask him about a photo he thinks is very good, he says: “Che is someone I don’t like, I don’t hate him, but I detest him. I don’t share his values. However, Korda’s photo is perfect. It’s perhaps the most reproduced photo, a masterpiece. I would like to take a photo like that. There is one photo I couldn’t take… the photo of November 27th. I wasn’t in Cuba at that time, we were very connected, but I wasn’t in Cuba. And that photo is missing from my catalog, from my narrative. I would have liked to be there, to accompany my friends. You know? I would trade the November 27th photo for the one of Che. I wanted to take that November 27th photo.”
V
Sitting on a bench on Paseo del Prado in December 2023, with his camera around his neck, he says: “I like to relate to all kinds of people. In Cuba and abroad, I like to go to fancy places. I also like to go into a solar, a “bembé”, into tough neighborhoods; for me, the worst thing is when you only have access to one of the two things.”
There are people, according to Feal, who have a lot of money and move in a certain circle and don’t go below it for security reasons. “I remember once I was with a successful artist friend at a party in Old Havana, and I realized he was scared. It was symptomatic for me that a Cuban was afraid in his own city. And you can feel fear if you walk alone at night. For example, I keep my camera in a bag without showing it off. It happens that some people don’t have access to certain social classes. I like to enjoy both things. A good conversation and having a drink with any type of person. I like to be transversal. That helps me with my work, helps me understand my country.” It’s not something he does only in Cuba. There are fancy Catalans, he says, who don’t go to Rambla del Raval, for example. “And they are missing the center of Barcelona, which is incredible. The city doesn’t belong to them. I like to feel that the cities belong to me, I like to move around like that.” And he tells me, as if revealing a secret: “The other day, in a bar, I met Manolín, El Médico de la Salsa. He told me he was going to play at the Salón Rojo del Capri, and I’m going because I like the hot stuff. There are some who won’t go to those places, but I ask them: Do they eat people there?”
Leandro really enjoys rumba, santo music, reparto… “My mom helped me a lot with this, to live in dense spaces. She taught me that if I saw a group of people on a corner, I couldn’t turn around, I had to pass through the center of that group. One night, going home, I did feel a little scared because it was late at night, very late. A gang of twenty guys was coming, there were screams and bottles, a street fight, and I did what my mom taught me. I went through the group.”
He tells me that he’s re-learning Havana, that he feels it has a different vibe than in 2022, the last time he was there. He tells me he likes to marry a lens until he masters it, he tells me that in the time a zoom lens moves, time is lost, he tells me he likes apparent “bad framing,” that defects can become effects. He tells me that we have to kill Cartier-Bresson, deny the previous ones to build something new, just as Cartier-Bresson denied the photographers before him. “What’s the point of doing the same thing? There are photographers who see Bresson as a Bible, they don’t move from there, from the ‘decisive moment.’ That’s why I say we have to kill him, bury him.”
He tells me his father didn’t recognize him when he was a baby, that his surname is his mother’s, who was a feminist who was with his father, Héctor, a theater director, and that some differences between them caused them to separate, and that she began having relationships to have a child independently (and that’s how he was born). He tells me his biological father went to Argentina, where he lives today, because he couldn’t stand living in Cuba. “Then I contacted him on Facebook, we talk often. He came to Havana, we met a few years ago. He is also a photographer, and a “gusano” like me, which is lucky. Because can you imagine finding a blind father? It’s good that our ideologies are similar. I met him in 2019.”
He tells me he would love to go to Argentina to visit him and get to know Buenos Aires. He tells me he likes new influences, that it gives density to one’s work, although you have to change the how or the what. He tells me he values curiosity, looking at photography books, seeing a lot of quality images, learning the technique and destroying it, not being afraid to take photos, not being afraid to lose a camera. And he tells me he would trade his camera, the one he’s holding in his hand, the one he’s raising in the air, for having taken just one photo of November 27th. “Because with a good photo you can build your work, with a good camera, you can’t. What’s important is the photo, cameras break, go out of style, but good photos don’t, good photos last.”
We walk along Paseo del Prado, as if looking for Neptuno street, Leandro telling me things as we bump into a horde of Asians, soup painters, and a girl in a sequined dress barely covering her butt…
“It’s important that Cuban artists who want to do so exhibit in Cuba. You can’t give the ground to the institution because it’s ground that gets lost. Five years ago we were more empowered, there was a network of alternative spaces: that can’t be lost. The art belongs to us. We have to see exhibitions of the next generations, because the State will always try to erase them, and it’s a mistake not to exhibit in Cuba because then they win. That said, it’s also necessary to denounce and demand the freedom of artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Osorbo, along with the thousands of people unjustly imprisoned by the Cuban regime.”
And he continues: “One of my gods is William Eggleston, one of the first to make artistic photos in color, although by studying him so much he has already bored me. I also like Constantino Arias, who photographed Havana nights with flash, like a night reporter, in the same vein as Weegee, the American photographer. The photos of mafia crimes, that flash-in-the-night aesthetic, I like a lot, and the work of Vivian Maier, although now I’m interested in taking photography to painting. Of Cuban photography, I would tell you that I respect Juan Carlos Alom, Raúl Cañibano, Chinolope…”
Suddenly something paralyzes him, a sound, a song, coming from a portal where a barber is shaving a mulatto. It’s a song by Wampi, the Cuban reparto artist. The chorus mixes with the noise of three cars sparking up Neptuno, “two hundred, Vedado!”, “three hundred, Playa!”, mixes with the voice of the convertible driver enticing tourists in front of Parque Central, creating a rich, lively mix, like a soundtrack that brings Old Havana back to life for just two or three minutes…
And Leandro looks at me intently and says: “You know something? When someone asks me about Cuba, I tell them everything is bad. Here there’s only one good thing, and that’s the reparto.”
* Translation by Fiona Baler.
