 Welcome to everyone. This is called The Vermonter's View of Cuba. It's an exhibition that's part of the Cafe Exchange project, and it's a parallel show to the four Cuban photographers, which is a show at the Darkroom Gallery in Essex. This particular one of Vermonter's Views of Cuba is here in the Pickering Room at the Fletcher Free Library. What we had started to do was invite four Cuban photographers to Vermont as part of an exchange, and when it became apparent that they weren't getting their visas, we created this parallel show of Vermonter's who've gone to Cuba and come back with images of Cuba. We have ten different folks here in this show, and you can come visit them at the library any day of the week. You can look on the library hours to see what day is to get here, and the show is open whenever the library is open, seven days a week, except for holidays. We're going to interview some of the photographers, and the other thing that we have, we have a book that is a catalog of the Cuban photographers, and it's phenomenal. It was put together by Dan Higgins, and then the other thing that we have that's for a donation is this poster that we created of the four Cuban works, and so we welcome you to see that as well as this show of the Vermonters. It's extraordinary because so many of us have been there and taken amazing photographs of the place, both urban as well as rural photos, and we're just trying to engage all of us in the story behind Cuba and create more relationships between us as people to people in this cultural exchange. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. This is great to see, and folks use this room all the time at the library for meetings, for school groups, and so that was part of the excitement of using this room at the library, was that it would be seen by lots of different people, not just those of us that come to our reception, so that was sort of exciting. Hi, I'm Barbara Chattera. I'm a librarian here at the Fletcher Free Library, and one of the things that I do here is I oversee our art exhibits, and this art exhibit that we have of Vermonters' views of Cuba came to us from Diane Geyer. She had sent us an email and inquiring if we wanted to have a show of the works of these photographers, and of course we would love to have them here, but when the exhibit was installed in the pickering room I was just completely bowled over. It is such an amazing exhibit and such a window into the world in Cuba, and that is just the kind of thing that we like to do here at the library. We like to be able to give people a kind of a window into other worlds and to also showcase the kind of work that Vermonters do in our own community, the artists in our own community. I'm delighted to think that there'll be all these meetings in this room, and people will be able to see it throughout the community. Yeah, I'm just delighted to have it here. Hi, I'm Louise Andrews, and I've traveled to Cuba twice, once in 2019 and once in 2020. Both trips were through the Cuban American Friendship Society, and I was an organizer for both of those trips. Memory is a little fuzzy as to which trip these pictures are from. It's either 2019 or 2020. This first photograph is a picture of just a neighborhood cafe. We arrived in Cuba, and this little place was just down the street from where we stayed. I thought it was so charming and tiny, and I loved all the flags, and we had a lovely little first dinner in Cuba there, so I have very warm memories of this particular place. The next picture is an artist. I was just walking down the street with some other people in our tour group, and just peeked into these openings that are often arched down all of these little streets in these very, very old buildings. He was just so receptive and friendly, and I loved his studio. I thought it was so fantastic the way the staircase comes up, and the photographs, I mean, the paintings that he's working on just spoke to me. I mean, he represents the Cuban people in their faces, and his face is absolutely wonderful, so that's that one. Finally, this other picture was on the right is the tour guide from both of our trips, and her name is Lorena, and we were at this area where they had all kinds of stalls with people's artwork in them, so it was pretty much a fabulous, wonderful place to go and look in all these little studios where people had their artwork, and they were standing in front of this mural, and the fellow on the left was dressed to the nines. I loved it, and he was speaking about the African influence on the art of Cuba, and that's Malcolm X, I think, on his t-shirt there, and it was a very moving and wonderful experience both times. I would go back any time. I wish our country would be a little more open to traveling back and forth from Cuba. I'm David Garten, I'm a photographer. I'd like to thank you for putting me on the spot and making me uncomfortable here, because I'm not happy doing public speaking at the same time. I'm really grateful for this opportunity, and it's really a tremendous opportunity to display these photos in public and have people have the opportunity to see them and appreciate them and learn from them, so here we go. To my left, your right, is a sequence of photos of my dear, dear friend, Sixta Justina Beiranes Leyes, who was born in 1915 and died in 2009 at the age of 93. This covers a 10-year span of her life from 1994 to 2004. Sixta was one of the most important people in my life. I met her on, I think it was my third or maybe my second trip to Cuba in 1994. She was very aggressive in confronting me and saying, You have to learn how to speak Spanish because English is not smooth. And I was totally in agreement with her, but a little taken aback by her severity. However, within a very short period of time, I came to regard her as an incredible resource, and within a short period after that, she was on a glide path to becoming one of the most important people in my life. I dearly loved her and I carry her here forever. This was her birthday on March 28, 1999, her 84th birthday, which was the day that the Baltimore Orioles had an exhibition game with the Havana Industriales baseball teams. And instead of going to the game, I went to seek this house to give her those sunflowers because that was what was important to me. And then this is her 89th birthday five years later. And for those of you Vermont residents and Vermonters watching this, I don't know whether you will recognize former Governor Madeline Cunan, who I brought to see Seeksta while Madeline was on a tour organized by the Flynn Theater. This is Sey Sardin playing percussion at Cajon de Hamel, which is an alley which presents a rumba performance every Sunday at noon. The audience is maybe 65 or 75 percent Cuban and 25 or 35 percent tourists. It's a very authentic and energetic performance. I've been attending it for many, many years. On this particular day, December 13, 2015, it was the first time I had ever seen Sey Sardin play percussion. It's the first time I had ever seen Sey Sardin in my life. And I really loved his approach to percussion. He had tremendous energy, incredible tone, really forward-leaning sense of time and driving musicianship. And I thought he was fantastic. When I downloaded the photos of him later that day, since I didn't know him, I couldn't read whether this was a good photo or not. You often catch musicians making grimaces while they're performing, contorting their faces. And it's just hard to know if you don't know someone, whether that's flattering or not. But a few nights later, I was walking down the street around 1 a.m. And I came across Sey Sardin, approaching me from the other direction on the sidewalk with a couple of other Cuban young men. And when we got closer together, I said, oh, you're that guy who was playing in Cuyahoma Animal. I love you. I love the way you were playing. And we got into a fantastic conversation, at which point now I got an opportunity to know him a little bit better and realize that it is a good photo. Moving right along, this photo is of my dear friend Andrea. Andrea is about 15 years younger than Sexta would be if she were still alive. And she's certainly not a substitute for Sexta, but she's another dear, dear friend of mine, very special relationship. Andrea came into my life and I came into her life shortly after her son was murdered. And I returned to Cuba and learned that someone who I had photographed was no longer with us. So one of the other young men in the neighborhood asked me if I wanted to bring the photo to his mother. And I said, of course. So I went into the house where I was staying down a dark hallway where no one was home, to the closet where the photo was stored. And my heart was beating really fast. And I thought, this is not the dream I expected to wake up to. But in this moment, I have an opportunity and a responsibility. So I brought the photo to Andrea's house and I entered and she was standing in her living room rooted to the floor like a boulder in her grief. And I told her that I had known her son and that I really liked him and that I was so sorry. And we hugged and then we went into the next room and sat down. And I held her for about 15 minutes. And people were walking in and out of the room going like, who's that guy? But I could see that they felt, well, I don't know who he is, but he's helping Andrea. So he's cool. And from there forward, we became very close friends with, as you can probably appreciate, a very special relationship. And we love each other. And she is the matriarch of her family and everyone loves Andrea. On this day, we were hanging out in her living room. I was taking a pause resting, not preparing to take any photos when she asked me to take a picture of her with her saints. So if Andrea wanted me to do something, now I was no longer on a pause. We went back into this room and all I said to her was stand over there. And she just went into the zone, giving me this incredible gift of an image showing her and her splendor in her environment. And this is a photo of the Capitol Building taken from the roof of the Hotel Saratoga, which exploded about two years ago. So this vantage point currently does not exist, although one can assume that it will be recreated when the hotel is rebuilt. Incredible viewpoint. I'd photographed from there over a number of years. On this particular day, I was photographing in the abandoned, ruined theater Campo Amor, which is located one, two blocks behind the Capitol Building and behind the National Ballet Theater, where a friend of mine squatted for about 30 years. And I've spent countless hours photographing inside that environment, which is just utterly surrealistic with trees growing from the third floor exterior balconies whose two inch in diameter roots have found their way three stories down to the floor of the interior of the theater. So on this day, I was working there for an extended period of time and I got dehydrated. And I said to Ray, I gotta go get something to drink. So I walked out the door, one block this way, another block this way, made a right onto this road over here, walked over to the Hotel Saratoga, never once looking up when I got to the roof of the Saratoga and turned to take this photo, which I've taken numerous times previously. It was the first time that I saw the sky. Then I was just floored. What a crazy opportunity, what a crazy, beautiful, wonderful configuration of clouds. And parenthetically, I was in Cuba two weeks ago, and this street was completely deserted, no cars, no pedestrians, a reflection of the post pandemic ongoing economic crisis taking place in Cuba as we speak. So that's a short rundown of the photos that I've got in this exhibition here today. Thank you for listening. I'm Jordan Douglas, and I had the opportunity to go to Cuba in January of 2015 on a trip with Burlington College. Peter Curtis was leading that trip a course on street photography, and I was able to bring several of my students from Saint Michael's College and also from Champlain College. The course, which I was assistant teaching, was about digital photography for the main, for mainly for the students, but I brought a whole bunch of black and white film, the thing that I like to do. I'm an analog photographer mainly, and so I, whenever I could, kind of made time to wander around and find photographs and explore the city and capture what I could. For the most part, what I did was I kind of went away from what I felt was touristy, the obvious things, the attractions, and moved a little more toward the inner city and the parts of Cuba that seemed really expressively in flux. The old history deteriorating and was really interested in how the people were kind of fitting into that, their family lives and the way the city continued to function despite all the erosion and deterioration of the infrastructure. So as I slowly kind of moved through the city in the heat of the tropical sun, I really tried to investigate what made Cuba, what made Havana distinct. As I meandered, I learned to move more slowly and that attracted less attention. It just kind of saunter and sits still for a while, and I was able to observe a little more peacefully without people approaching me and asking questions. This church, which is the Iglesia del Carmen, has a very tall statue, which you can see from most parts of the city. It's always kind of looming somewhere in the distance, and quite a beautiful little monument to some of the history there, and you can see the clouds. I was shooting on black and white film and this process of printing, which affects the color, is called lith printing, L-I-T-H. It's an alternative darkroom technique that moves the black and white toward a warmer tone. These aren't sepia toned. That effect happens in the printing. It also explodes the grain a little bit so the images can get really grainy, and I think that effect works really nicely for this kind of urban and antiquated imagery. This is an example of a little courtyard inside of an apartment complex. Most of the apartment buildings have these little inner sanctums where you can do your washing and hang laundry and probably hang out, have a cigarette or whatever. Just a peaceful little moment. One of the things I'm always interested in photography is how you can see the signs of evolution and change. Like I said earlier, what remains of the past and how that is affecting the present. The last picture over here was one where I finally got a little more creative. As I was walking through the city and photographing over two weeks, I kept asking myself, what am I actually doing here? Sure, there's these beautiful moments all around me. Interesting things to photograph, but what's going to make it special? What about this city? What about this time can I try to capture? It was I think one of the last nights that I was there and the twilight was happening, the light was fading, and I had 3200 speed film, very high speed film, so I loaded my camera with a 3200 speed film and I got alongside this wall which surrounds Havana called the Malicon. This is the wall that symbolically separates the Cubans from America, 90 miles to the north are the Florida Keys, and so this wall not only contains the waves which crash over that retaining wall and splash way into the street, but also it contains Cubans. They're not, they can't go to America, at least at that time, and hopefully that will change. And of course all these antique cars from the 40s and 50s are a big part of the city, and so I took a few of these photographs with a slower speed as the light was shifting, and I feel like I finally got to something that seemed a little more unique and expressive, and so that that expressed green it has to do with the high speed film, and of course the lights and the old car, it starts to feel like it's a little bit out of time. What you can't really see here is the height of that wall, it's actually probably about chest high, and in the evening young Cubanos come and they hang out there, it's like a party scene for a lot of families, they live in close quarters with several generations in a small apartment, and so for young people their opportunity to go out and hang out together and dance and party a little bit is often here along the Malicone, so it's a very colorful place. Here it seems a little quiet, it was about to rain, but also again a very signature part of the city. So I haven't been back since 2015, but I was hoping that the changes that Obama had announced would take root, but obviously that hasn't happened. Cuba is still very isolated from Americans, but I'd like to go back again. Hi there, my name is Jamie Hansen, I live in Montpelier, Vermont. There's six pieces here that I took in 2019. I did a solo trip there, spent three weeks traveling and mostly spent my time in Havana, so a lot of these photographs here I believe are in Havana. I was surprised that I was going to be so taken by the beauty. I wasn't planning on doing much photography on this trip, but I was just blown away and couldn't resist and just feel so grateful to have witnessed all that I witnessed and I wanted to bring back small snippets of this of the magic that I got to experience there. Most all of the photographs, actually all the photographs were taken with my phone and this was nice because I could take the photos without anyone really noticing, so I was able to quietly capture what was just happening in front of me. So it was mostly just catching the essence, the light, the movement, the energy of what was happening around me and I was definitely drawn to the people. I pretty much always had people in the photographs and there's one photograph here that this young couple, they sold flowers and there was something about them that I just felt drawn to asking if I could take their photo and they hopped up on this ledge and the whole thing took about 10 seconds and this was actually the only photograph that I asked someone to pose. You'll notice that all the other photographs are just me catching people doing their daily routine. My name is Barbara Young. I have traveled in many many places around the world photographing and one of the most interesting places I think that I've ever had a chance to visit has been Cuba and the images that I have here on display tonight reflect part of my vision of what I saw when I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks there. This image that's closest to me right now is in the Teatro Nacional and it is a supremely gorgeous building which just is to me so elegant in terms of bringing forth the contrast that exists in Havana today between the very very beautiful and the very very ancient and dilapidated and these two people were sitting admiring the view there was no show on at the time there was not a ballet or a concert but I just sort of saw them looking up and tried to capture their awe of the beauty that was around them and of course when you travel outside of Havana into the tobacco region you see a completely different view of the world and this is a little small humble cottage of a tobacco farmer and what I liked about this image was the was the clothes on the line and the hat on the chair and the hut in the back where the tobacco is dried it just kind of represented the old days in Cuba and the last image that I have is a Fidel in an old abandoned building which contains a beautiful rooftop restaurant it's a little south of the central area in Havana and it just again it's the contrast between the elegance and the decay and you see it over and over again and to me it was fascinating to see how warm and loving the Cubans were and to photograph there was just an awesome privilege so I wanted to remind everyone that these two shows the one at the darkroom gallery in Essex is open for the rest of the month on Fridays and Saturdays and the one at the Pickering Room in the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington is open the hours of the library during the week and also till the end of the month till the beginning of July so July one in one case and July six in the other case so please visit the shows on your own and if you're interested in one of the catalogs you can still order one by contacting me and they're $20 and it's a collection of the photographs from the Cuban photographers and it's absolutely spectacular thank you all for your interest in Cuba and we hope to continue our friendship exchange with the people of Cuba thank you