MANUEL PIÑA (b. 1958)

“I took those pictures between 1992 and 1994, during a very dramatic period in Cuba,” Piña recalled of his iconic Aguas baldías series. “I felt that I did not have many options left in my life nor in my work” (quoted in Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection, exh. cat., Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, 2007, p. 150). The present photograph belongs to a series of fifteen images that portray the yearning and desperation of Cuba’s Special Period of the 1990s, instigated by the fall of the Soviet Union and aggravated by the balsero crisis of 1994, which saw tens of thousands of Cubans flee the island in makeshift rafts. The series takes its name from T.S. Eliot’s apocalyptic poem, The Waste Land, adapting its symbolism—drowning, mortality, purification, rebirth—to the precarity of the Special Period and the treacherous passage across the Straits of Florida.

Piña shot Aguas baldías at the Malecón, the curving seawall and esplanade that wraps around the coast of Havana and that epitomizes the fluid boundary—no less, the U.S. embargo—separating Cubans from freedom. In the present Untitled, a young man walks in shallow water away from the Malecón, the monochrome sky and water merging before him into a long, slanting horizon. “I shot the series in black and white because it matched my feelings at that moment, and because of the scarcity of materials,” Piña explained. “I overexposed the roll and then developed it, so the grains would look more dramatic” (ibid., p. 152).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park