Las Ventanas de Fidel

Cuba has two currencies, the local one, el Peso Cubano, and the higher value tourist's currency, the CUC, el Peso Cubano convertible, which is worth approximately 25 times the local currency. When visiting the country as a tourist, you do not have many opportunities to pay with the local currency, (unless you downgrade your privileged tourist status and want to live a bit more like a Cuban). This series of images were taken mid-2016, when the historic Cuban president Fidel Castro was still alive. This is an outgoing project as I intend to return to the Caribbean Island in 10 years’ time to further document what is going on then. Fidel Castro's government provided every Cuban citizen the bare minimum necessary to live; free but little varied food, free health care, free homes in which to live, and free education up to university. This is obviously not enough, so Cuban’s are continuously struggling, and there for inventing ways to provide themselves with a more dignified way to live. The windows/stores are one of these ways. This series is a photographic documentation of this particular form of generating income. Throughout Cuba, almost every home has one or more windows/store where the residing family privately sell what they have. These goods are what each family has bought previously from the government. Everything is regularized with an account book, which is then handed over to the government, the real controller and owner of everything.