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Havana street photography

By Daniel Leventhal | Published April 13, 2020

Havana street photography – the third in a series of photographs taken on my two trips to Cuba in Dec. 2014 and January 2019.

This post will have a few more car photos, including the one in the left corner above taken in the Regla district of Havana – it’s hard to resist those old cars on any photography walkabout in Havana (or elsewhere in Cuba for that matter).  This latest set much more so than the last one (which mixed architecture and people shots besides the cars), however, is really about the people of Cuba, and mostly on street photography explorations in the always fascinating and never disappointing older, more weathered districts of Havana.

Havana is very deserving of its reputation for outstanding street photography opportunities.  It’s not really my thing, as I have said in a number of prior posts, and I don’t normally emphasize it, but it is huge part of a photography workshop in Cuba and especially Havana. I have to say I greatly enjoyed the street photography there in contrast with my discomfort with it in a lot of other places. I was told that it gets a friendlier reception in Cuba, and my very positive experiences there bore that out. I did my best to be discrete and respectful.

To the left is one of my favorites (taken with permission in Cojímar on the outskirts of Havana).

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”

― Henri Cartier-Bresson

In street photography it’s about capturing the image. Always have everything ready (i.e. the camera settings, a battery with a charge, a clean lens – good prep is critical), and when you see a shot, get it. Don’t dawdle – it may disappear. That couple embracing may part company, the woman with the beautiful face could turn around, the person on the old balcony may go back inside – I think you get it. That means that there is sometimes only a fleeting amount of time to capture the image. One learns to react quickly, and sometime focus suffers, such as getting the dreaded back focus (when the lens focuses behind the intended target). No worries – better to get the image with a little bit of soft focus than to miss it!

As I was working on my notes for this post I saw one photographer write that “if you created the perfect city for photography in your mind, it could be Havana”.  Every block of Havana seemed to offer something, and you will see that in this post. The colors, the extraordinary faces, the vibrant street life, the lost-in-time atmosphere … there’s nothing like it I have ever experienced for street photography, although I have yet to travel to some of the other leading international destinations attracting photographers like Morocco, India, Vietnam and Brazil, to name a few.  Sadly, as I write this in April 2020, it doesn’t seem like that international travel is going to happen anytime soon.

These photos mostly were taken in Centro Habana (Central Havana) of which we had a glimpse in the previous post. Some say it is Havana at its most intense, and others say it is the most authentically Cuban neighborhood in Havana. There are a lot of taller apartment buildings (four to five stories), and the street life is dense in the narrow streets. It is a poorer, mostly working-class neighborhood situated between more affluent Vedado and Miramar, on one side, and more touristy and better maintained Habana Vieja (Old Havana) on the other side.   Several were also taken in Regla, another poorer barrio on the other side of Havana Bay. Both Centro Habana and Regla are old parts of Havana at their grittiest and most photogenic.

You will also see a few photos taken in the nearby fishing village of Cojímar (the one above and three below) – the background for Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. It’s where Hemingway kept his sport fishing boat, the Pilar, and his former captain and friend Gregorio Fuentes lived there. He was the model for Antonio in Islands of the Stream and supposedly also the inspiration for Santiago in Old Man and the Sea. Another picturesque, if badly fading, place. We were in Cojímar on both trips, and perhaps I will share some other photos of the village in a future post.

I hope you enjoy these.  I am not the only one who thinks that it is the people of Cuba who make the country special, and I think you will get a sense of that as you scroll through the photos. The place has real corazón (heart).

If you would like to see a selected number of these in monochrome, go here to a page on my other site. 

Next post we will journey to Viñales Valley in Pinar del Río Province, western Cuba, and after that we will return to Havana.

Click on (or tap) an image to expand it (and use the arrow to the right on an expanded image to go through the set, if preferred over scrolling down in the post).