Two visits to Cuba, nearly twenty years apart. During the first, I walked the streets every morning around six, holding a Nikon in my hands for the very first time, my backpack filled with rolls of film. Even then, I was captivated by the Cuban light—warm, soft, and enveloping. I had no idea that I would encounter something just as beautiful again only two decades later.

Havana bathed in the morning sun is the most beautiful sight I have ever witnessed through a camera lens. Cuba has changed in the meantime—more than I had expected. Many of the buildings that once felt extraordinarily photogenic have fallen into disrepair or disappeared altogether. Back then, guides would not show these places to foreign tourists, instead presenting carefully curated “Potemkin villages” of Havana, sometimes marked with plaques such as “Here Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea.”
Over time, poverty has deepened. Police have all but disappeared from the streets—there is hardly anyone left to control. For many Cubans, daily life has become a struggle to find even the most basic food, searching through waste in the city centre for something as meagre as a rotten tomato. Children, the elderly, and able-bodied men without work—all alike.
This time, we were no longer followed by secret police officers. Fear has faded, replaced by frustration with the current government and a strong sense of nostalgia for the late dictator, Fidel Castro.
And yet one thing remains unchanged: that extraordinary light—the kind that makes you rise before dawn, simply because you cannot do otherwise.
The photographs were taken for the book Cuban Tango in the Rhythm of Blues by Eduard Freisler, published by Edice N.

(CV) Renata Kalenská (*1974) is a journalist and passionate amateur photographer. She works for Deník N and Czech Radio Plus. She is currently writing her twelfth book. She is the recipient of the Ferdinand Peroutka Award and two Czech Journalism Awards.