GEOGRAPHY OF SILENCE

This project proposes the creation of a photographic, anthropological, and geographical corpus titled Geography of Silence. The work focuses on the Cuban landscape as a palimpsest of failed projects, using the railway system and the sugar industry as the central metaphor for the decline of the revolutionary project.

I was not born with the Revolution. I was born into its long, weary shadow. Building on a decade of consolidated practice in the intimate documentation of the urban space of Centro Habana and Old Havana, where I have explored various social phenomena such as prostitution, shelters, bathers on the Malecón, and the shifting social geography on streets like Monte, Reina, Ejido, Galeano, Águila, among others.

This project expands the field of research toward the peripheral and rural geography historically connected to these symbols of progress. I will avoid sensationalism in order to focus on dignity and resilience in the face of adversity. The goal is not merely to document material ruin, but to capture—through patient observation and an austere aesthetic—the human trace in the interstice between the collective dream and its eroded reality, generating a critical visual diary of the anthropological consequences of sixty years of unfulfilled utopia.

This is proposed as a critical visual investigation that, from an anthropological rigor and artistic sensitivity, offers a testimony of a historical moment of transition and collapse in Cuba. By focusing on failed infrastructure and the life that persists around it, the project documents the materialization of a utopia's failure, not through rhetoric but through the concrete evidence of the landscape and the human face. This visual diary thus stands as an archive for understanding the social and geographical consequences of a national project that, sustained for decades by slogans, now faces the irrefutable eloquence of silence: not just the absence of sound, but the silence of the machines, the political silence about failure, the silence of forgotten communities, the eloquent silence of objects.