Varadero Elegy

Varadero is the cradle of one of the most important economic sectors in Cuba: tourism. It's the largest seaside resort in the Caribbean and has a huge assortment of hotels, shops, banks, water activities, and entertainments of all kinds. But its most precious treasure is the beach: an uninterrupted strip of 20km of white sand that every year attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world. I came to this place by accident while traveling for Cuba with other intentions. But that beach caught my attention right away. So I began to walk those 20km every day for weeks, trying to figure out how life was going on that streak of paradise. But what I found, more than a paradise, was a Limbo under construction, where capitalism and communism, tourists and residents, the rich and the poor people, coexist and often blend together, creating a split of carefree and contradictory humanity. An aseptic place that gives relief to all the characters in this collective drama that we call modern society.