Our Man in Havana 4: Habana Viejo in film

Habana Viejo, or Old Havana, is one of the most amazing displays of architectural and decorative wealth that has slipped into urban decay that you are likely to see anywhere. I rate Havana up there with Rangoon, Detroit, Palermo, and Kathmandu as extreme examples of what happens when you neglect your infrastructure for decades (Republicans in USA: are you paying attention? Do you comprehend?).

Because of the contrasts and ironies, Havana is a visual delight. I highly recommended it for photographers - but do it the real way, use a film camera. For the pictures below, I used my Leica M2 35mm camera with Kodak Tri-X film to simulate a 1950s photojournalist look.

Let's take a semi-random walk through Havana Viejo. We have already briefly looked at the waterfront in a previous article (click the link). The photograph above is the Terminal Sierra Maestre, where cruise ships unload.

This is a block of somewhat rough apartment buildings on the Avenida de Bélgica, across the street from the Estación Central de Ferrocarriles (the central train station). To get there, I took a tricycle rickshaw, pumped by a very friendly driver. One of my maps showed a home of Jose Marti, but I am not sure if it is in the scene or on a side street.

On Teniente Rey, we saw school groups being taken to museums. All through the country, school children wear neat, clean uniforms and are mostly well-behaved. Education has been a high priority for the government.

At the Plaza de San Francisco, plenty of local folks hang out along with tourists.

Near the Casa Oswaldo Guayasamín (an Ecuadorian painter who was a friend of Fidel), there were interesting patterns of light and shadow.

Empedrado is a major road that leads west from the Castillo de la Real Fuerza at the waterfront as far as the Prado. The people-watching is great, and, as you can see, selfies have come to Havana.

Brazil (also known as Teniente Rey) also runs east-west and ends at the neoclassical El Capitolio. These people were waiting for a pharmacy or possibly a clinic.

The Ballet Nacional de Cuba is in a big hulking building on the corner of the Paseo del Prado and Colon. I heard tap dancers through the windows. 

The Paseo del Prado (also shown on maps as the Paseo de Marti) is a tree-shaded boulevard with a broad pedestrian walk in the center. Everyone goes there to be seen and to watch. I saw mothers with their little girls in tutus, nuns, guys on skateboards, chess-players, and musicians. A 10 or 12-piece orchestra was set up on chairs and playing first-rate rhumbas and dance music. Elderly couples were gliding across the paving blocks. The grand architecture that lines the Paseo is a visual treat.

Some hints: Havana appears to be completely safe for walking and exploring. We did not feel any bad vibes. Everyone we met was friendly. Beware of difficult walking conditions on cobblestones and bumpy sidewalks. Watch for holes (sometimes big ones) in the sidewalk or street. I recommend low hiking boots. If you are a tourist, you can use restrooms in the better hotels, and if it is hot, sit and enjoy the air conditioning.

Camera notes: I took these photographs with a Leica M2 rangefinder camera with 35mm and 50mm Summicron lenses using Kodak Tri-X film. I developed the film in Kodak HC-110 developer, dilution H, for 10 min at 68° F. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner using SilverFast software.

Movie note: Our Man In Havana is Graham Green's 1958 novel, which was set in Cuba before the Revolution. It is about a vacuum cleaner salesman who may be a British spy, or maybe he isn't. The movie version (directed by Carol Reed of The Third Man fame) was filmed exactly as the revolution was underway. Fidel visited the set, and there is a rumor that he tried to get a date with Maureen O'Hara. He liked American actresses, and apparently many of them liked him.

Maureen O'Hara in Havana during filming of Our Man in Havana in 1959 (from IMDb)

Fidel with the cast of Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana 3: View from the Top

When I visit a new city, I always try to find a tower, church steeple, or high viewpoint to see the lay of the land. When we arrived in Havana, my co-travelers and I checked into the Park View Hotel on Calle Colon. And by luck, the Park View had rooftop access.

An advertising brochure claims that the Park View was one of Havana's most sophisticated hotels in the 1920s. Maybe so, but it looks like it has barely been vacuumed or cleaned since then. Some character-building adventures:

• Room 1: 1 cm of water on the bathroom floor, with more water dripping through the ceiling. OK, they had a second room for us. The lady at the front desk was very courteous.
• Room 2: only 2 towels total. OK, one can serve as the bathmat, the second we shared. 
• Shower hose: burst upon use. When repaired, the new hose was too short for the head to mount in the holder on the wall. 
• Safe: locked, and no sign of a key anywhere. Was a previous guest's possessions still in it? 
• Hot water: we had plenty, but some of our friends in other rooms never had any. 
• Elevator: worked, but the electronic display showed floor 6 all the time, and there was no sign of any type of safety inspection. 
• Breakfast: the fruit was good, but the rest mediocre. The tablecloths were stained and clearly well-used. In the hotel's defense, much of the food in Cuba as of early 2017 is not skillfully prepared. 

As for the view: the restaurant was on the 6th floor. Just off the landing, there was a narrow spiral steel stair that went up somewhere. I ascended and saw an unlocked door to the roof. Well, this was a treat. The photograph above shows the view looking west with the Straits of Florida to the right.

This is the view to the north towards the mouth of the harbor, or the Canal de Entrada. Note the construction cranes - Havana is beginning to rebuild. Visit soon if you want to see old Havana, The building on the very right is a former cigar factory. The bellhop in the Park View said the cigar factory had some major collapse in the center and all repair work had come to a halt.

To the southwest, the big building with the oval windows in the attic is the prestigious Ballet Nacional de Cuba (Cuban National Ballet School). It has 3000 students. In the evening, on the nearby Prado, you often see little girls in their tutus with their parents.

Room with as view: our second room, the one without a cm. of water on the bathroom floor, had a great view of adjacent rooftops. I love these complicated urban scenes. Note the pigeon pens on top of the green corrugated roof.

I also took a Tri-X photograph with my Leica camera. This has a more gritty urban feel, but you lose the color data. More Havana to follow....

Color photographs taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera. In the first picture, I used a Leica 50mm Summicon lens on my Fuji. The black and white photograph is a Tri-X 400 exposure taken with a Leica M2 camera. Click any picture to expand to 1600 pixels wide.

Margaret's Gro - Continuing Decay, Feb. 2017

Bad news on the folk art front: Margaret's Gro. is deteriorating badly. Margaret's Grocery, at 4535 North Washington Street, Vicksburg, was an amazing piece of imagination and devotion crafted by the Reverend Herman D."Preacher" Dennis. Margaret died in 2009, after which the reverend moved to a nursing home. Without his constant attention to painting and repair, his Temple to the Lord deteriorated and crumbled. Preacher Dennis died on September 4, 2012.

I occasionally bicycle to the site, and each time, the decay is more pronounced. Around 2010-2011, a group of preservationists tried to get funds to move and rebuild the temple in a protected space, but it was the depths of the recession, funds were unavailable, and the project did not proceed. Some of the sculpture and parts have been moved, but the bulk of the building is slowly collapsing.

The bus in 2014 was faded and in need of protection. as of mid-2017, it has been moved to another site for protection.

This is the grocery in 1985, about the time that H.D. Dennis married Margaret.

Only five years later, look what he had achieved. It was still a grocery, and you could buy some supplies there. But for the most part, the Gro. attracted tourists from all over the world. If any of you readers visit Vicksburg, take a look before it is gone completely.

Here are some older photographs, scanned from Kodachrome slides.

Our Man in Havana 2: On the Waterfront

Havana is a spectacular seaport. Facing the Strait of Florida, the Spanish knew in the 1500s that a fortified city here could control the strait and protect their treasure fleets before they set sail across the Atlantic to return to Spain. And being only 90 miles from the Florida Keys, Havana became a convenient travel destination for Americans in the 20th century. During the Prohibition era, Havana was wet, fun, naughty, and nasty. What happened in Havana stayed in Havana. Remember the musical, "Guys and Dolls"? The gambler, Sky, takes the dowdy Sarah to Havana, and after a number of milkshakes containing Bacardi, she really begins to enjoy herself as well as Mr. Sky.

This is the view of Habana Viejo (Old Havana) from the east side of the harbor channel, from below the Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro (El Morro fortress). There was some sort of smoky fire burning in the city, unless it was a factory spewing smoke. Air pollution is a serious problem in Havana with all the old cars and industrial sources of smog.

We crossed the harbor by ferry boat (see the previous article) from Casa Blanca to Havana Vieja. I was surprised to see dilapidated wharfs, clearly unused for decades. Three large wharfs are attached to a huge terminal building, known as the Terminal Sierra Maestra. The northernmost wharf has been restored and serves cruise ship passengers, but the southern ones are unrestored. The photograph shows the Santa Clara, but in faded letters you can see "Port of Havana Docks Co,"

The Sierra Maestra terminal was built between 1910 and 1914, a period when Cuba generated tremendous wealth by selling sugar to the United States. A crane barge with bucket was moored next to the building, and I saw some new sheet pile along the shore. The building with the domes across the street is the Sacra Iglesia Catedral Ortodoxa de San Nicolás, the only Greek Orthodox church in Cuba. 

A sign describes some of the renovation that is underway. I tried to enter the building at what looked like an unused door, but a guard shoed me out (they do that to me a lot). 

The restored part of the terminal is quite handsome. The tower with the clay tiles reminds me of railroad stations in the US Southwest built by the Santa Fe Railroad in the late 1800s or early 1900s. 

Che Guevara is here, as he is almost everywhere else in Cuba. Alberto Korda took the iconic photograph on March 5, 1960, at a funeral service for Cubans workers who were killed when a ship carrying arms for Cuban revolutionaries exploded in Havana harbor. Korda used a Leica M2 and 90mm lens on Plus-X film. Che is a martyr of the Revolution. Granma, the "Órgano oficial del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba" wrote, "Che, Cuban citizen by birth. Since 1959, the Cuban people have considered Che one of their own, and the heroic guerilla responded in kind." Click the link to read the rest of the article. It's amazing what skilful propaganda can do.

The color photos above are from a Fuji X-E1 digital camera with 18mm and 27mm Fuji lenses.

Our Man in Havana 1: the Hershey Train

Dear Readers, this will the first of a series of articles about Cuba. This is a fascinating travel destination in every way - culture, music, architecture, nature and bird life, and art. And the people are friendly, gracious, and welcoming.

I borrowed the my title from Graham Green's 1958 novel, Our Man In Havana, which was set in Cuba before the 1959 Revolution. It is about a vacuum cleaner salesman, who may be a Mi6 British spy, or maybe he isn't. Who can be sure? It's a great read, like most of Graham Green's novels.

The Hershey Train was built in 1922 by the US Hershey Corporation to service its sugar mills and farms in central Cuba. The line runs from the east side of Havana Harbour, the area known as Casa Blanca, to the city of Matanzas, about 57 mi to the east. This is the only electric line in Cuba and now mostly serves commuters. According the the World Tram and Trolleybus web page, The Hershey train is one of the few interurban rail systems still in operation.

Because of Cuba's lack of infrastructure investment since the Revolution almost 6 decades ago, the line is essentially unchanged since it opened in 1922. The current rolling stock may be Spanish, replacing the 1920s American Brill electric cars. According to Lonely Planet, all rail service in Cuba is erratic because of frequent breakdowns and track bed failures. The trip to Matanzas takes at least four hours, and the return may or may not be possible on the same day. The day this picture was taken, January 21, 2017, this author was pleased to see the green car slowly trundle out of the Casa Blanca station, with chickens and pedestrians slowly moving off the track to make way.

The Casa Blanca Station is located on the east side of the harbor channel, not in Havana Vieja (Old Town Havana). It can be accessed by the harbor ferry. The Hershey train did not run into the main part of Havana because United Railways, the British company that ran Cuba's trains in the first part of the 20th century, did not allow the Hershey train to use its rails into the city. The ferry boat is a fun ride across the harbor. Two tickets cost only 0.50 CUC, or about 50 cents US. There was surprising security presence and X-ray inspection because many years ago, someone commandeered the ferry and tried to sail it to Florida. We saw the local bicycle club in the waiting area.

This is the view of the east or Casa Blanca side of the harbor channel.

Photographs taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera.

Escape from Berlin, 1945: a Family Journey

Dear Readers, this article is different than my normal Urban Decay topics. Still, it is a story of decay - of the catastrophic collapse of an evil government and the fate of some of its innocent victims. This is the story of how my family escaped from Berlin in April of 1945 during the chaotic final days of the Second World War in Europe, when the Soviet armies were entering Berlin.

My family came from Greece and moved to Germany in 1938, when my grandfather got a job in Berlin. He was a highway engineer. At this time, the Germans were building the autobahns and were at the forefront of highway technology. My grandfather (Opa) and mother were Greek-born, while my grandmother (Oma) and Aunt Hellas were German-born. Needless to say, moving to Germany in 1938 was a terrible strategic decision.

The family moved to a flat in the Charlottenberg area of Berlin, near the Neu-Westend U-Bahn station and near the 1936 Olympic stadium complex. My mother remembers that they lived on the second floor at the corner of Ratzeburger Allee and Ebereschenallee. These buildings survived the war with little damage, and the area is still a quiet residential district. Some of the apartment blocks are rather severe. I have seen similar apartments in Polish cities.

My mother was a young girl then and did not remember the exact the address of the flat. But when I showed her this picture of the door with twin portholes, she immediately recognized it (you can see it in Photograph 1 behind the yellow car). She said when you entered, one flight of steps led up and another led down to the basement, which was very frightening.

This is Steubenplatz today, with Ebereschenallee coming in from the right. My mother remembers that one store facing the platz in the 1940s was a pharmacy.

This is the Neu-Westend U-Bahn station. The location and shape is likely the same as in the 1940s, and the vertical beams with rivets may be pre-war.

My mother and Hellas went to school. My mother remembers that girls and boys were separated by a barbed wire fence. The teachers were very strict, and everyone had to rise and say, "Heil Hitler." She also remembered seeing Jewish people wearing the large yellow stars on their clothes. A correspondent from Germany wrote that jews in the Reich were forced to wear the yellow star as late as September 1941 (I thought it was much earlier). Jews of German origin were first deported in October of 1940 in south Germany, and mass deportations continued as late as October 1941. 

School class portrait, 1942? Mobile phone scan from paper print in album.

After the war started, the family applied to leave Germany, but because my grandmother and Hellas were German-born, they were not allowed to leave. The family was not in a wealth category in which they could buy an exit permit by turning over valuable assets (such as art) or properties.

Opa in his office, 1943 (photographer and exact location unknown)

As the war progressed, my grandfather lost his job. Oma's Uncle Max and his wife took over the apartment so that it would appear to be leased to a German family. Opa had to remain hidden in one room in the flat for fear that he might be arrested. My mother said that other residents surely knew that a Greek family was in the flat, but no one ever turned them in to the police. The ladies were blond and spoke fluent German, so they could leave the flat and move about. The family sold possessions to raise money for food. They had only two food vouchers, for the two German-born  members of the household. I assume Max and his wife shared their food.

For 18 months, the Allies bombed Berlin day and night, and for most nights, residents had to shelter in the cellars. But Opa had to remain hidden upstairs even during the bombings. One day, a bomb fell through the bathrooms and the tub from above crashed through the ceiling. Luckily, the bomb did not explode. She remembers Opa listening to the BBC on a wireless receiver with a blanket over his head to muffle the sound. Listening to foreign radio was an offense that would lead to execution.

Late in the war, the authorities evacuated Aunt Hellas and other school-age girls to the woods of Prussia to escape the bombing. But she and a young actress or opera singer knew someone important in the Goebbels propaganda organization, and they secured travel permits to return to Berlin.

My mother said one day she and Oma were out shopping for vegetables and heard noises of gunfire. The civilian population had been so thoroughly insulated from real news by the government's propaganda, they had no idea the Soviet army was entering the city. Today, we find this hard to believe. But totalitarian governments know that control of the media means they can dominate the populace. 

This is a map of Soviet advance from:
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/rkkaww2/maps/1945W/1BF/Berlin/1BF_1UF_Berlin_Apr19-28_45.jpg

They rushed home, grabbed a few possessions, and went to the train station. Prior to this, residents were not allowed to leave Berlin, but all order must have broken down. Amazingly, even as the Nazi government was collapsing, trains were still running. I assume they went to the Westend Bahnhof. My mother and Oma went one day, while Opa and Hellas followed a day later. 

The 1946 photograph above shows a tank graveyard near Westend Bahnhof, from :
https://www.stadtmuseum.de/sites/default/files/styles/mfp_popup/public/mediapool/gallerie/berlin-1945-panzerfriedhof-gueterbahnhof-westend.jpg.

Their destination was a small town in the Schwarzwald (southwest Germany) named Reichental, where the family had vacationed before the war. Everyone with any sense tried to flee to the west, away from the Soviets. The train ride was terrible. When allied planes flew overhead, everyone got off and sheltered in ditches or fled into fields because the planes strafed the trains. People were packed tight into cattle cars. 

Oma had a brother, Kurt, who had died near Kursk (Russia). His wife was on the train with two children. The baby died, and my mother said they threw the baby out because there was no room. It is hard to believe horrors like this. I do not know if the family was ever in touch with Kurt's wife after the war and do not know what happened to Max and his wife. 

My mother, Hellas, Oma, and Opa spent a few months in Reichental and then moved to a United Nations refugee camp. Three of them briefly returned to the apartment in Berlin, I assume to recover documents and possibly some possessions. But essentially they had lost everything. They eventually made it back to Greece in the late-1940s. They had endured a decade of war, tragedy, and turmoil. 

Dear Readers, this was only 72 years ago, in what had been one of the most urbane, educated, and developed countries in the world. So many millions of innocent people suffered and died. But despite the lessons of history, many people are still susceptible to the hollow promises of demagogues and frauds. Consider the 2016 election in the USA and the scammer who entered the White House. Note how he adopted the classic techniques of fascists to ferment discord within the nation, feign victimization of a particular demographic, manufacture enemies, and then make hollow promises that only he can save the nation. 

Be eternally grateful that we still have an open press free of government censorship in USA. Beware of propaganda tools that parrot the party line and manufacture an alternative fantasy (i.e., Fox News). And beware of banning books in schools and libraries to control the narrative of history and deceive the populace. These are classic tools of totalitarian and fascist governments.

Remain vigilant and never let a war like this happen again.

Cement Silos of Redwood with Fomapan 100 Film

In 2010, I wrote about the deserted cement silos in Redwood, Mississippi. They are still abandoned and loom up above Hwy. 3 in all their concrete ugliness. It is a good site to test film, and I returned to test Fomapan 100 Classic film in my Fuji GW690II medium format camera. The tracks lead to the International Paper mill just to the north.

The brush is pretty thick and it is hard to reach the silos from the former work yard on the west. This photo is not completely sharp because of camera motion.

A hulking ruined concrete mass is in the work yard. Did they pour unwanted concrete into some sort of bin?

This is a loading dock on the railroad side of the main building. Being winter, there were no obvious snakes, bats, or poison ivy present.

This is one of the chutes that would dispense powder into trucks. This was a 4 min. exposure at ƒ/11. The light meter indicated 30 sec. at ƒ/11, but I knew that to adjust for the film's reciprocity, I should use 8 times the metered exposure. Reciprocity failure means that in dim light, film no longer responds in a linear fashion to increasing exposure time. Most film is linear in the range of 1 sec. to 1/1000 sec., but if you are in the range of many seconds or minutes exposure, you need to multiply the light meter setting many times. A Wikipedia article describes the phenomena, or contact me if you want to do some film photography and I would be glad to help.

Film: Fomapan 100 Classic.
Camera: Fuji GW690II with 90mm lens.
Development: Xtol by Praus Productions, Rochester, NY
Scanning: Minolta Scan Multi using SilverFast Ai software, 2820 dpi.
Resize for web display: ACDSee Pro 2.5.

Vicksburg Decay 2016 with Fomapan 100 Film

Mercy Hospital, Vicksburg (currently unused)

This is a three-part experiment: a new film, a commercial laboratory I had not tried before, and new scanner software (I know, I know, too many degrees of freedom).

Experiment 1: A few months ago, I read some highly positive reviews of Adox CHS 100 film, a classical fine-grain black and white film. While in Berlin last September, I stopped at Fotoimpex (a real film store) to buy some, but they were out of stock. The sales agent suggested I try Fomapan 100 Classic, a similar film made in the Czech Republic. Fomapan was established in 1921, so it has a long history of making sensitized materials for the photographic industry.

In December here in Vicksburg, during some overcast days with soft light, I tried a couple of rolls of the Fomapan in my big Fuji GW690II camera (this is a medium format rangefinder camera that takes eight 6×9 frames on a roll of 120 film). I like days with soft light when an exposure will reveal details in the shadows, such as under porch roofs. My usual practice is to overexpose and underdevelop to soften the contrast, so I exposed the Fomapan at EI (exposure index) 64.

Experiment 2: I did not have time to develop the film at home, so I sent it to Praus Productions in Rochester, New York. Praus developed the film in Xtol developer at N-1 (pull one stop), as I specified. The negatives looked pretty good, a bit dense but with full exposure range. Next time I will try EI 80 or 100 to just slightly reduce exposure.

Experiment 3. The Minolta scanning software that came with my "antique" Minolta Scan Multi scanner was pretty kludgy and was low resolution on a modern big monitor. Surprisingly, the German company Lasersoft Imaging still sells a version of their Silverfast Ai software for the Scan Multi. I thought the price was outrageous, but a Christmas 25% sale made it a bit more palatable, so I bought a license for Ai. It runs on my Windows 7 computer and correctly controls the scanner. Result: major improvement over the Minolta software with far more options for film profiles. Note: many photographers use Vuscan software, but I could never get it to work.

Zollinger's Hill Road

Results: Well, I am pleased. These are beautiful full-tone negatives. They have similar grain to Kodak Tri-X, which this reinforces the classical B&W look (which can't be simulated with software). The photograph above of Zollinger's Hill Road almost looks like the bushes are covered with frost, sort of a hidden garden. Click any picture to enlarge it and see the texture.

This is Marcus Street near where it intersects Confederate Avenue. The house is no. 1620. This was a 1/2 sec exposure at f/22, with fill flash to add some light on the tree trunk.

This cottage at 1630 Marcus Street is empty.

These steps are next to 1630 and lead down to Ethel Street. During summer, the jungle mostly engulfs the steps.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Blvd. is the former Openwood Street, leading from downtown east to the Vicksburg Military National Park. It is one of Vicksburg's older streets and is lined with historic cottages.

The cottage at 1900 MLK, Jr., Blvd. suffered a fire.

No. 1826 MLK, Jr., Blvd. is a 1920s or 1930s cottage, now empty.

No. 1832 is a duplex partly sheathed with the concrete material shaped to look like limestone blocks.

In the future, you will see more examples of this Fomapan film as well as the ever-dependable Kodak Tri-X. In the USA, you can order Foma products from Freestyle Photographic Supplies in Los Angeles. Support companies that sell film, and take pictures with film. Really, it will make you a better photographer.

Historic Foma posters are courtesy of Freestyle Photographic Supplies, Los Angeles, California.