Snapshot: Perception and Gender in Cuba
THE IDEA
"The Cuban Experience: Music and Culture" class is a faculty-led program that takes WAC students to study music, dance, ethnomusicology, and culture in Cuba for ten days in January.
In order to attend this program, I (with the help of my faculty adviser, Dr. Lampman) successfully applied for a grant from the Cater Society of Junior Fellows to study the difference in perceptions of Cuban culture among Cuban women and American women.
To do this, I wanted to combine my growing passion for photography with my research topic. On Dr. Lampman's suggestion that I take disposable cameras for my participants to use, I decided to compare the photographs taken by a few select Cuban women participants with my own photos. By analyzing differences in content, I hoped to approximate an idea of our perceptions of Cuban life are different or similar.
MY RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1. Can artistic expression, specifically photography, change the perception of Cuba as frozen in time?
2. How do Cuban women perceive their culture, its history and its current changes?
3. How do the perceptions of Cuban women compare to those of an American woman?
THE PROJECT
Goals
1. to increase my cultural understanding of a region in which I plan to live and work, by using photography to form significant relationships with people living within that culture
2. to represent these relationships in a meaningful body of photographic and literary work which compares Cuban and American women’s perceptions of Cuban culture in order to facilitate deeper communication and understanding between our two countries
3. to be able to effectively communicate the results of this project, helping discredit misconceptions about Cuban culture and improve mutual Cuban-American understanding
4. to encourage the women participants to pursue a similar communication of their own experience, through possible publication of their own photos
In Cuba
I began my own section of the project immediately, recording media almost constantly with a notebook, iPod, and smartphone. However, I took a few days to build a rapport with the women who ran the hostels where we stayed, so that I wasn't approaching them with an odd request out of the blue. After one night where they accompanied us to a music venue and danced with us, the ice broke enough, and the three women I talked to were very enthusiastic. In hindsight, I likely could have asked them much earlier. I labeled the cameras, showed them how to use them, and asked that they take pictures of what's important to them. I gave no other qualifying information to avoid as much bias as possible. The three women spent about four days taking photos. I collected a brief, twenty-minute interview from each of them afterwards, confirming basic information like name, age, occupation, etc., as well as their opinions on photography in general and this project in specific.
Maria Julia González Bautista, 77, is a native habanera. "The truth is always very beautiful," she says, when I ask her if she thinks photography is important. She likes to take a lot of photos when she has the chance, using a digital camera a friend sent her from abroad eight years ago. "The whole world is looking at my country," she laughs. "But I don't want them to say things that aren't true."
Devora Moreno Ortiz, 54 (not pictured), loves the ocean. The Malecón is where she goes to relax and spend time with loved ones. "To remember is to live again," Devora told me, and that's why she was interested in this project. I'd come to think of her as quiet, a little shy, but when I began asking her about photography she talked at length with genuine interest and emotion.
Alina Sánchez Vargas, 54, moved to Havana in 1993 from a town outside of Santiago de Cuba, where she got her bachelor's in Psychology. "For me, photography is like a story," she says. "Of a person, of a family, of a country..." Although Alina values and enjoys photography for its ability to record memories, she doesn't often take photos, because she doesn't have a camera. For this project, Alina took pictures that she wanted to show "what's exciting about [her] country. The daily things, the things families do...the beauty of this country." Usually, anybody taking pictures in Havana is a tourist, so she and her sister Moni got some interest and attention from Cubans who wondered why a Cuban was taking pictures. The picture she was proudest of depicted the bread vendor who always passes her house.
Data & Analysis
My media:
978 photos--130 chosen for the website (8 encounters, 65 people, 57 places)
37 audio clips--26 chosen for the website (5 encounters, 6 people, 15 places)
31 video clips--17 chosen for the website (9 encounters, 4 people, 4 places)
Alina:
27 photos--16 people, 11 places
Devora:
27 photos--10 people, 17 places
Maria Julia:
27 photos--27 people
There's a huge disparity in the number of photographs representing my perceptions and the three women's perceptions. This reflects the technological disadvantage, which in turn indicates the difference in our socioeconomic statuses. Although the metaphorical paradigm presented by "old" film photography versus "new" smartphone photography was of use in framing the thought behind this project, I would have been better served taking iPods, so that my participants' ability to take photos was equal to mine.
I tended to focus about equally on human subjects and non-human subjects (architecture, plant & animal life, etc.). However, overall, the participants focused more on people. This could suggest that Cuban people and the participants' relationships with those people are more significant to them than the objects of their everyday life. This also indicates my reluctance to breach a taboo by photographing people without their express permission. Alina, Maria Julia, and Devora didn't feel this tension, likely because as native Cubans, they quite sensibly don't perceive themselves as outsiders.
CONCLUSIONS
1. Can artistic expression, specifically photography, change the perception of Cuba as frozen in time?
Yes. Photography is a tool. While your access to it is a significant determining factor in your use of it, it's certainly a powerful, impactful way of communicating lots of information. The enthusiasm of the three women who helped me with this project is evidence of the importance of photography as a communicative tool. Art is transformative and subjective; photography is art, but it also substantiates that art with valuable data. I hope the presentation of this website challenges the notion that Cuba is "frozen in time" a little bit: even though photography itself freezes things, the depth and variety of media I collected here, along with my and the public's long-term interaction with it and the ladies, makes the experience of this slice of the Cuban experience more dynamic.
2. How do Cuban women perceive their culture, its history and its current changes?
The very (very) small sample of Cuban women who participated in this project overall feel positively towards their culture. They recognize the difficulties and negative aspects. Alina, for example, spoke to me about the difficulty of obtaining food: they use libretas (ration books) to receive their allotment of staples such as rice, beef, etc. Even in the hostel staff, socioeconomic disparity was evident, on a very different scale than is common in the US. Universal education is not a myth in Cuba; yet there isn't much opportunity to put that education to good, innovative use. Yet their recognition of these negative aspects only informed their pride in their history and culture. There's not a sense of shame, or anger. My impression of their photos is that the daily sediment of their lives--their intraction with their family, friends, and neighbors, the places they like to go--is what concerns them, not the overarching, academic debates about social, political & cultural processes, etc. They're personally happy to meet americans, receive their business, get the chance to ask them questions. It's obvious and self-evident, but they're just people.
3. How do the perceptions of Cuban women compare to those of an American woman?
The difference in perception is that I saw Cuban life more as a finite object--concrete experiences, places, etc.--and they saw the continuous fabric of their lives. I'm able to analyze, label, and rearrange the information I collected from a comfortable distance, reducing it in one sense. But Alina, Maria Julia, and Devora don't have the luxury of distance. While our subjects were more or less comparable, the information those photographs represent has very different meaning for me than it does for the three of them.
At this point in the project, I've brought in a number of filters that have reshaped and recoded the raw data that makes up the concept of "Cuban culture." First is the filter of limited time and ability to record data; while I tried to mitigate that by recording as many photos, videos, audio clips, and texts as I could, I was still taking in a pretty small set of data. Second, photography itself is a significant filter--what do we choose to include or exclude from the frame? Third, the very narrative of this website changes those data even further: I actively selected which data to present, how to present them, how much or how little context I should give.
I think that's how learning should work, though, especially learning with empathy. You collect the data as objectively as possible, as I did, and then you start sifting for layers of meaning, drawing connections, forming opinions until you come to a series of understandings (which may be conceal understandings that are deeper still), and then you finally start sharing it with other people. We can't necessarily perceive unfiltered knowledge, so we just have to be careful about how we filter it. In the context of this project, that means that my perceptions of Cuban culture are likely very different from the perceptions of other American women on the trip, and that my perceptions of the Cuban women's perceptions as represented in photographs are likely very different from their own. But if none of these perceptions is being compared to a single, standardized Truth, they each have their own relative value.
I'm continuing to meet the goals I set for this project: I'm conveying the data about Cuban life, and conveying the differences in how it's perceived, but I'm also communicating the mindset I believe can facilitate communication and understanding in the relationships between people of these countries.
EXPANSION
In an ideal world, I'd be able to repeat this project with the improvements I've learned from doing it once. I'd like to provide better technology, and spend more time analyzing the photos with the participants themselves, so that our results would better incorporate both the etic and the emic perspective. I'd also think it would be necessary to repeat the project with a different group of women, of different age, race, socioeconomic status, etc. whose likely differing opinions would inform their photography and represent a greater cross-section of "Cuba."
Using this website as a tool to organize, analyze, and narrate the data of this project has proven useful in composing the photo essay. Much of the text I generated for the blog posts, captions, and other content on this website is in the first draft of the essay. I hope to publish the essay itself on this website as well, and in publications on campus (the Washington College Magazine, for example) or possibly even outside of WAC. This project has reinforced my interest in photojournalism as a possible career, but has also given me an indication of the financial and intellectual difficulty of the work.
