Cuba Was An Exciting And Pompous Place Then

OTR's interest in Cuba goes back a long, long way. In his youth, there was always Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea. Around 1954, Great Uncle Charlie gave OTR a shoe box filled with postage stamps from Central and South America, and the Caribbean, but mostly from Cuba. Then came the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It was hard to ignore all those military aircraft flying over the Eastern Shore on there way south. At the same time, waves of Cuban refugees moved north to find work. One of them was a college professor from Havana who became OTR's Spanish teacher. She went on to become a well-known poet and writer in the expatriate community of Miami where she still resides. And there was OTR's infatuation with tropical Florida, the adopted home of the Cuban culture. During his college years, it was satisfied with many semester breaks south of the Tamiami Trail. Work only added to the fever. Hardy a year went by from 1988 to 2007 without several projects on the Florida mainland or in the Keys. Every trip was an opportunity to explore Cuban cuisine. Today the Florida-Cuba curiosity continues through careful attention to Babalu, an essential news blog for the Cuban experience. OTR has followed Babalu for more than six years.

It has been over fifty years since the existence of the free exchange of people and ideas between the U.S. and Cuba. When the last liner left Manhattan for Havana, the U.S. was concluding its most spectacular decade as the world's most powerful economic engine. Cuba, in spite of a strong tourist economy and long-standing middle class was about to feel the power of collectivist revolution among its hard-working, neglected poor. Few of us experienced both of these worlds on the cusp of change, but we can look back at them through the eyes of historians and photographers. In today's Der Spiegel, we have a chance to see the people of Manhattan and Cuba through the eyes of the "legendary" German photographer, Heinrich Heidersberger. In 1954, as a ship photographer on several cruises from the Big Apple to Havana, he shows us what was, and what may be, life and industry for these neighbor nations.

OTR hopes readers enjoy Heidersberger's photo essay as much as he did. Like our experience in Cuba, the photos disappeared for many decades. They were rediscovered by viewers in 2001. Makes one wonder when American tourists will rediscover Cuba with their own eyes.

Illustrations: Arbuckle Coffee cards (1880s) from the family archives.