It is a glimpse from inside a racing pit at the Havana Grand Prix. It is the alien-like streetlights dotting the Via Blanca coastal road. It is a childhood friend named Alina standing on the Havana sea wall in her gingham-ruffled swimsuit. It is the blur of the ocean as seen from the passenger's seat of his mother's sporty Karmann Ghia.
Fernandez, a West Palm Beach-raised Havana native, is an art historian and a photo editor of 25 years with various Time Inc. magazines. But more important, he is a collector of vintage Cuban photographs, images captured over the course of a century, from the 1860s to 1965. His collection, which includes more than 3,000 works, is considered to be the most extensive private collection of Cuban photography in the world.
Now, 307 of the photographs are featured in a handsome coffee-table book titled I Was Cuba: Treasures From The Ramiro Fernandez Collection (Chronicle Books, $24.95).
Put together by Kevin Kwan, the respected creative director, I Was Cuba is a kind of tribute to a richly textured island, a place too often reduced to regime-sanctioned iconography and mojito clichés.
"There is not a single picture in the book of a 1959 Chevrolet," says the New York-based Fernandez, 56, whose parents still live in West Palm Beach.
The photo collector has returned to South Florida this week for two book discussions Wednesday at the Boca Raton Museum of Art and one on Friday in Coral Gables. Together with Kwan, he will present images from his collection.
A feast of myriad images
The book itself is a visual feast of street scenes, portraits, cityscapes, rural panoramas and historical snapshots.
There are, of course, the famed rumba dancers of the 1950s, the national and the visiting divas, like Cuban rumba queen Celia Cruz in 1954, American jazz-age legend Josephine Baker in 1951, Argentine tango singer Charlo in 1930, Cuban female impersonator Bobby de Castro in 1958.
There are the sportsmen, the dashing Cuban-American Olympic fencer in 1910, the Havana polo team of 1915, the rural cockfighters of 1930, the Cienfuegos rowing champions of 1952, the oiled bodybuilders of the 1950s, the boxing stars, Kid Chocolate in 1933 and Antonio "Puppy" Garcia in 1953.
There are the hardscrabble farmers of the late 1800s, the Chinese field workers in 1905, the sugar-cane cutters in 1956.
And there are the most enduring of Cuban protagonists - the royal palms, guavas, mangos and ceiba trees in all their majesty.
It is a collection Fernandez began in 1981, when he was working a temp job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He met an art dealer there who showed him his Cuban pictures. Fernandez was taken by the work of Jose Gomez de la Carrera, a noted photojournalist from late 19th-century Cuba, and purchased an album of 20 photographs printed in the vintage-era technique that used an egg-white emulsion.
"What happens with photography, it's an interesting thing. It's like a window," says Fernandez, a photo editor at People magazine until he retired last year. "You look through the window, and you scan everything - a tree, a car, what kind of car - and you process the information."
Memories of a lost era
One of those early images of Havana's Parque Central brought back a rush of memories - of visiting his grandmother at the hotel she called home: a Bohemian gathering place of parlor conversations, people-watching and communal meals shared by artists, writers and retirees.
Cuca Machado, the dear family friend he called his grandmother, was a free-spirited woman who filled his childhood afternoons with the colors and aromas of 1950s Cuba. She married a boulevardier (man-about-town), wore bold and mysterious perfume, Mitsouko by Guerlain, and, yes, kept a pet monkey.
"She showed me Cuba from her perch. It was an eyeful for a kid," recalls Fernandez, who left Cuba at age 9. "So I had the right sort of seed, the right fertilizer to get me going."
But those sights locked into his memory are more than just images of an island. They are heartbeats of daily life.
This is one of the reasons Fernandez took up collecting photographs.
He found that certain pictures revealed fragments of life stories, stories he could relate to even though he didn't know anyone in the frame. Certain images fascinated him in the way that the modern graphics on the boxes at his father's pharmaceutical firm, Milton Laboratories, fascinated him, the way American magazines fascinated him, the way his first glimpse of Edward Weston's Pepper fascinated him.
Years into his collecting, Fernandez found one particularly haunting photograph that sent him back to a time in the 1950s when everyone in his Havana seemed obsessed with potential invaders from Mars.
The photo, a rather spooky shot of a string of modernistic, X-shaped streetlights blurred alongside the ocean, is not your quintessential image of a Cuban beach. There's not a palm tree in sight. But Fernandez jumped at the sight of the 1958 photograph.
"These were my space invaders when I was a child. These were my visual toys on nights when we drove east toward Varadero beach," he says.
Forced to leave in the '60s
Many of the other scenes he remembers were caught through the lens of his mother's Leica M2 camera.
His mother, Tita Fernandez, was an amateur photographer who played squash, loved race cars and dabbled in early revolutionary volunteer work. She was a close friend of Naty Revuelta, the Cuban socialite who became Fidel Castro's lover and the mother of his child, Alina Fernandez Revuelta, now an author and radio commentator in Miami.
His mother snapped a couple of the photos he included in I Was Cuba. There's one of a 4-year-old Alina atop the Havana sea wall. And there's a shot of Ramiro as a boy, standing in the background of a photo of a famous race-car driver during the Havana Grand Prix of 1960.
Shortly thereafter, the Fernandez family exiled to Miami. They moved to Belle Glade three years later, when his father, Ramiro, opened a grocery store there.
"It was the early '60s. The place was full of Cubans who were there to work the sugar mills. I would say those were my happiest years," recalls Fernandez, whose family - his parents and his older sister, Sara Silvia - moved to West Palm Beach in 1967.
Fernandez attended John I. Leonard High School in Green-acres and worked part-time jobs in Palm Beach: as a busboy at The Breakers and a gallery attendant on Worth Avenue.
He still remembers his greatest thrill as an art student at Palm Beach Junior College: going with his art professor to the financier J. Patrick Lannan's house in Palm Beach to view his extensive modern art collection.
With an art history degree from Florida State University, Fernandez took scholarships, then jobs at a range of museums in Maryland, Ohio and Washington, D.C., where he landed his first permanent job at the Museum of African Art in 1975, as a photo librarian assistant. A few years later, he began his magazine work, which brought him to publications that include Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, People en Espanol and People magazine.
A visual journey to a far-off land
As his career thrived, so did his photo collection.
For him, it became a visual journey not only into his childhood but also into a Cuba he didn't know. Through the images, he traced historical trends and cultural nuance. He feasted his eyes on his favorite decade, the 1950s, and studied the abrupt change in Cuban photography a decade later.
"The revolution gave photography a jolt. Photographers were propagandizing the ideals of the revolution. There (was) a new charged imagery," he notes. "When I collect photography from that period, I try to look at images that were probably rejected by the revolutionary censorship."
For instance, Fernandez found a rather skewed photograph of the Argentine rebel fighter and executioner Che Guevara. Here, he is not the ubiquitous beret-topped icon. He's a random face hidden behind a row of microphones.
"These pictures ended up in files that people have been taking out of Cuba for years. They're certainly not the images sanctioned by the government," says Fernandez.
The strength of the collection is its attention to "the unexpected and the vernacular ... off-the-cuff images that reveal something more immediate, more intimate about the place," writes Kwan, the creative director who helped shepherd the book, in the introduction.
A Singapore native who also left his island home as a boy, Kwan says he felt an instant connection to the photographs.
"There's an emotional quality to them. I saw a man trying to reconstruct his memory of an island," said Kwan in a telephone interview from New York. "Cuba is so strangely ubiquitous in the photography world - the nostalgia of the crumbling buildings, the vintage cars. But this is different. It's an intimate view of Cuba." ~Liz Balmaseda
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