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 The flight from Miami to Havana is shorter than the trip from my home to my college. Although Cuba's geographic proximity to the US has played a significant role in the history of the two nations, it's easy to forget just how close that distance is. |  An ornamental door lit by the orange streetlights and the hall behind it lit by a single cold fluorescent. I was continually fascinated by the interaction of the public and the private in Cuba's urban architecture. People passing on the street can hear and see much farther into homes than we're used to in the States, but there's also the very real doorways that maintain privacy. |  The house of Neftali and Cinthia. Many houses were similarly open to the air, private space marked only by an ornamental door. |
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 "Caution: Dangerous Intersection." As we neared the end of a day spent mostly in a lurching tourist bus, this sign reflected my thoughts about how we'd interacted with the people and communities we'd visited that day. Tourism is Cuba's main industry, but its consequences are often negative. I found it difficult to balance my very real desire to see new people and places, which the bus tour allowed me to do, and my ambivalence about the very superficial, artificial nature of those interactions. |  Daniel Gonzalez began talking to me in the crowd as if we'd known each other for years. "I am who I am because of the Revolution," he declared, unprompted. He insisted we take a selfie and that I look up his website, danzaurbana2013.com. It no longer exists. "My craziness is my country and art," he said. |  Pedro Pablo Perez Perez is a licensed costumbrista, or costumed historical interpreter. When he saw me taking a picture of him from a distance, he approached, reassured me it was only 2CUC for as many posed pictures as I'd like, and meticulously gave me the correct change. |
 A plaque in Trinidad honoring Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican friar whose time in the Spanish colonies turned him into a vehement advocate of indigenous and enslaved people's human rights. |  Frankie and Yerani are two fisherman who sell their catch along the Playa del Este. To read more about them, click on the image and follow the link at the bottom. |  In the parking lot of Jose Marti airport, I earnestly approached a man standing by a beautiful old car, asking him if I could take a picture of it. Only later did I realize that I had asked a taxi fare to take a picture of a car he himself didn't own or have any connection to. Soon enough, the famous Cuban cars lost their novelty factor. I became more deliberate in how I approached people to take pictures. |
 The Cuban flag flies alone amidst a sea of empty flagpoles. My interaction with the political delicacies of the US-Cuban relationship was sporadic, tense, and ambiguous. Only a few people asked me my thoughts about the relationship, and their reactions to my diplomatic non-answers were lukewarm. |  The polarizing starkness of the light in this stairwell caught my attention. All the architecture I encountered seem angular, multifaceted, and magnetic. My perception of Cuban architecture is that it's both fractal and fractured, containing hidden information within information within a deteriorating facade. |
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