This selection of vintage photographs, graciously made available by Mr. Ramiro Fernández of New York City, is offered on LLMC-Digital to provide historical background and context for our emerging Cuba Legal Patrimony Collection. Cuba is a very young country. In fact, the period of Cuba’s most significant development parallels the evolution of photography since its invention in1826. This happy coincidence means that photographs can be found to illustrate most of the important eras of Cuba’s history.

Of course, recorded history in Cuba goes back to Columbus’ landfall in 1492. However, during the first three centuries of Spanish rule the Cuba colony was a backwater. The single noteworthy historical occurrence in the first century after Columbus was the near total extinction of the native Taino people due to decimation from introduced infectious diseases and hardship under the Spanish encomienda system. In the following two centuries Spain’s imperial attentions were focused on the more promising opportunities for plunder and colonization in central and southern America.

Modern Cuban history began with a boom in sugar production. It began in the late 1700s, but blossomed as Cuba came to dominate the trade following the loss of the world’s leading plantations in San Domingue during the Haitian revolution, 1791-1805. With an explosion in Cuban plantings post-1800 came a massive increase in the import of black slaves from Africa and the other Caribbean islands. This was followed later in the century with the less numerous introduction of Chinese indentured labor. Both ethnic groups still figure prominently in the life of modern Cuba.

While most of Spanish America seized independence in the 1820’s, Cuba remained loyal. It soon became Spain’s most profitable colony. A first major move toward Cuban independence came during the Ten Years’ War, 1868-78, when an independent government was formed. That effort failed when the United States declined recognition. One motive may have been that annexation of an independent Cuba would appear awkward, since U.S. policy ever since President Polk had aimed at buying Cuba from Spain.

As the price of regaining control in 1878, Spain promised greater local autonomy. In practice it tightened the control from Madrid. When guerilla warfare inevitably returned in the mid-1890s, Spain doubled its repression. Strings of blockhouses were built across narrow parts of the island to help monitor guerrilla movements. Suppression escalated in the last half of the decade under the governorship of General Valeriano Weyler. He earned the scorn of most of the world with his introduction of reconcentrados, precursers to the 20th Century’s concentration camps. Up to 400,000 Cuban civilians reportedly died of starvation and disease in these camps. In response to this and other horrors, public sentiment in the U.S. shifted heavily toward supporting Cuban independence.

In 1898 a mysterious explosion sank the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor. That provided sufficient excuse for a war, which the U.S. won quickly and decisively. Spain ceded Cuba in December of 1898, and four years of U.S. military occupation followed. Nominal Cuban independence came on 20 May 1902. But the U.S. retained the right to intervene in Cuban politics as it believed necessary, and to supervise Cuba’s finances and foreign relations. Through the Dawes Amendment to the independence treaty it also annexed a portion of the island, Guantánamo Bay, as a military base in perpetuity.

The supervision of Cuba’s political life led to a second U.S. occupation during 1906-1909. Subsequently the U.S. influenced Cuban affairs with a somewhat lighter hand, preferring to exercise what control it felt necessary in alliance with a succession of pliable strongmen; most notably Gerardo Machado (1924-33) and Fulgencio Batista (1933-44 & 1952-58). Economic inequality, widespread unemployment among youth and peasants, political persecution, economic regulations that favored some groups disproportionately, and perceived official corruption, led to widespread dissatisfaction, particularly in the growing middle class. The air in post-WW II Cuba was full of revolutionary sentiment.

Although they failed in a coup attempt in 1956, rebels led by Fidel Castro took their guerrilla war to the mountains and eventually gained the upper hand. They entered Havana in early January, 1959, forcing Batista into exile. The popular revolution was initially viewed positively in the U.S.. But Castro’s subsequent legalization of the Communist party and execution of hundreds of Batista followers, soon soured relationships. This led in April of 1961 to an attempted, albeit proxy, Third American Invasion at the Bay of Pigs. That failure, and the subsequent “cold war” between the U.S. and the Cuban government, has been the dominant factor in Cuban civil life in the half century since.

Ramiro Fernández and His Collection

Ramiro Fernández is a collector of vintage Cuban photographs, images captured over the course of a century, from the 1860s to 1965. His collection, which includes more than 3,000 separate works, is considered to be the most extensive private collection of Cuban photography in the world. This selection of photos, originally assembled for the book I Was Cuba by Kevin Kwan, shows over 300 of these photos, from the famed rumba dancers of the 1950s, to the Havana polo team of 1915, to the hardscrabble farmers of the late 1800s. This is a visual feast of street scenes, portraits, cityscapes, rural panoramas and historical snapshots. Assembled over the past three decades, the collection spans more than one hundred years of photography and is unique in its focus on the unusual and the vernacular. The I WAS CUBA formatting showcases these exceedingly rare images in a bold visual narrative “dream journey” that weaves together the history of the island with biographical elements from Fernández’s life.

Ramiro Fernández was born in Havana to a family involved in the pharmaceutical industry. He left Cuba at age nine in 1960, growing up in Palm Beach County, Florida. His professional life has been spent into New York, where he worked, first as an art historian, and then for 25 years as a photography editor at Time Inc.; contributing to such titles as Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, People, and People En Español

Fernández first began to collect at the suggestion of his grandmother, who foresaw the coming turmoil and urged him to collect images of a Cuba that was fast disappearing. He began the collection in 1981, when he was working a temp job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he met an art dealer who showed him some vintage Cuban pictures. He was especially taken by the work of Jose Gomez de la Carrera, a noted photojournalist from late 19th-century Cuba, and purchased an album of 20 photographs printed in the vintage-era technique that used an egg-white emulsion. As a witness to revolution in his youth, Fernández's consuming passion has been to build a collection that can serve as a testament to the lost Cuba he still remembers. This captivating sampling from his vast collection is an intimate view into a bygone era of glamour, political upheaval, and astounding visual culture.