ALBERGUES

Albergues is born from the need to look directly at what the Cuban State calls a "temporary solution" but which in reality is a sentence of years, sometimes a lifetime.

In Havana, the deterioration of housing and the government's neglect cause collapses that claim lives. The families who survive and lose almost everything are relocated to shelters, supposedly on a temporary basis. But that transition stretches on for years: there are people who are born and die waiting for a decent home.

That transition, conceived as brief, drags on for years. I have seen people born and die waiting for a stable home. I have seen children grow up behind cardboard walls and sheets trying to mark a perimeter, a minimum of privacy. I have seen fragile elderly people enduring leaks, lack of drinking water, and overcrowded conditions, while the institutions remain absent.

I was born and still live in a room in Old Havana that adjoins a colonial-era building. That structure has barely received any structural maintenance over the years. I know, with an uncomfortable certainty, that I myself could find myself tomorrow in the very same conditions I photograph. That close possibility is not an anecdotal detail: it is part of why this project cuts through me. I do not photograph from the outside. I photograph from the shared margin.

Since 2020, I have been documenting this reality in Old Havana and Centro Habana. I have seen children, the elderly, entire families surviving exposed to the elements. I do not seek pity, but rather recognition and a visual memory of a wait that power prefers to keep invisible.

Albergues is a testimony of the fracture between the state promise and concrete life. An archive of dignity that endures.