Cuba, Photo Essays

Cuba’s People In Portraits (Part 2 of 3)

July 28, 2011 By Jorge Royan

This week, Cuba commemorated the attack on the Moncada barracks of July 26, 1953, that propelled Fidel Castro to national fame and became the first battle of the Cuban Revolution. For Cuba’s leadership, the anniversary captured the quandary the Cuban government finds itself in, half a century after the Revolution took power in 1959. On the one hand, July 26 is the Revolution’s foundational moment and provides a cause for celebration. But Cuba is also in the midst of its most ambitious economic reform since the Castros took power, as the government tries to liberalize the Communist system and kickstart a stagnant economy. “We have to definitively break the mentality of inertia,” Vice President José Ramón Machado Ventura said in a speech on Wednesday, at a July 26 celebration in Ciego de Ávila.

To mark the date, The Latin America News Dispatch is running a three-part series of slideshows, featuring images of Cuba shot by Argentine architect and photographer Jorge Royan. The second installment consists of portraits of Cuban people. See the first installment of images of Havana here.

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