I have an essay in Slanted #21 about Cuba and Cuban graphic design, as well as a feature of Cuban street photography by myself and Andrea Tinnes shot in Havana and Trinidad. It is called “The Human Memory Machine”.

An excerpt:

Like most humans, I have forgotten far more than I will ever remember. Our memories are akin to series of short films or a highlight reel – tedium has to be tremendous in scale for us to recall it. We are probably lucky for this – the hours lost to bureaucracy, waiting in lines, waiting in traffic, waiting on others, et al. We retain only the highlights of our lives – the first kisses, the extreme violence, the romance, the pain and the embarrassing.

In December of 2011, my wife and I took a belated honeymoon in Cuba and Mexico, a week in Cancún with a week in Cuba sandwiched smack dab in the middle. Like all vacations, I retain only glimpses of my time in Cuba – a few hundred memorable scenes hard-cut together. If I were to catalog this time, it’d include these key scenes by way of example:

– Visa anxiety as I waited to go through customs in Mexico. Americans still aren’t allowed to go to Cuba, other than by obtaining a special visa for educational or relief purposes. I’d paid a tariff to have an extra signature of pages put into my passport so that no Cuba immigration stamp would land in my passport.

– The anticipation of fuselage smoke in the Cuba Air shuttle plane that never emerged.

– A sign outside a Havana discotheque which read “Tourists will be assaulted here” in Spanish.

– Strolling through a warehouse full of vegetables, fruits and tubers from organopónicos, urban organic farming stations that criss-cross Cuban cities – the gardens an answer to the lack of support from the fallen Soviet Union in the new century.

– A dog gnawing the skull of another dog in Trinidad.

– Sitting on a beach chair sipping rum next to the ocean in Playa Ancon tapping out an essay for Slanted on my phone while my wife, clad in a turquoise and salmon-colored bikini, takes hundreds of photos of the reflected surface of the ocean in a vain attempt to capture the beauty of the fish nibbling at the dead skin in her feet.

– Being asked for money by new Cuban acquaintances and complying.

– Being asked for money by new Cuban acquaintances and refusing.

– Being sick of being asked for money and instead asking new Cuban acquaintances for money, cutting them off at the pass.

– Chatting with a guard outside of a Havana cigar factory, plumbing the depths of my high school Spanish language education.

– Meeting a farmer who is the spitting image of Ronald Reagan on the side of a highway, a package of cane sugar candy in his outstretched palm crawling with fire ants.

– An extra-malty bottle of beer with a polar bear on the label downed while walking Havana’s back streets, it hitting the spot in a way that few drinks do.

– An unofficial taxi driver telling I and the three other tourists in the car from Havana to Trinidad how much more money he makes on these quasi-legal trips than pursuing his regular work as an emergency room surgeon.

– Chatting with a young man with a PhD in finance and who was fluent in English, German, French and Mandarin about his most rewarding employment option: working in his grandfather’s gift shop selling wicker knick-knacks.

– Illicitly watching some members of the Buena Vista Social Club make their way through their repertoire of music on-stage through the window of a nightclub from the street. 

– Days of walking across Havana, taking in the general streetscape, photographing signage as we traversed the city. 

This particular scene is the one that will have the most resonance with Slanted readers – documenting vernacular signage has become a collective pastime for designers over the past number of years, codified as much in print (Ed Fella’s Letters on America) as on-screen (Instagram). Designers shoot photo after photo of sign after sign, but often take little notice of the socioeconomic environment that brings may examples of signage to life. This is what makes the signage of Cuba such an amazing repository of inspiration – the years of economic embargo, an economy flooded with products from Soviet-allied nations and a dearth of American brands, complemented by an economy that limped along in the 1990s. The Cuban experience is so utterly singular in the contemporary global scheme that it must be noted, particularly in the realm of graphic design…