“THIS! This is the photograph you will use when you write about us!” Zenaida Calvo Puig insisted, smiling, with her fingers pointing at the image. Her sisters, Ángela and Olga, also in their eighties and nineties, applauded her decision.
“This,” the photo Zenaida was pointing at, was a 1940s photograph of the five Puig sisters, dressed to the nines. The excavation of this image from Olga’s substantial wardrobes had come after several attempts on my part at capturing a reasonable portrait of the five women. The sisters repeatedly insisted that, for a suitable formal image, they should wear their best, but hardly-ever worn, clothing, make-up and mismatched hair extensions, all of which predated Cuba’s Special Period. Yet, after examining the prints, we agreed that the photographs did not look right. Together, the Puig sisters and I struggled with how to represent Afro-Cuban women of their generation.
To be clear, Ángela, Zenaida and Olga also disliked another image taken in 2014. It’s an informal portrait, not of the ilk we had been attempting previously.
Clockwise from top: the author, Ángela, Zenaida and Olga Calvo Puig. 2014.
Olga, in particular, appears especially annoyed at taking the group photograph and scowled at the camera during every single shot in the brief series. Her consternation is understandable, however, because Olga has been the owner and long term caretaker of the family archives from an early age. Her mother’s local Espiritista, or spiritual adviser, adopted Olga as a baby. The family archival collection helps Olga to navigate her multiple family histories. Moreover, she inherited this practice from her adoptive father who had worked in the National Archives in the 1930s. As a teenager, Olga walked the shelves of Havana’s archives and perused documents on government regulations and police files on Afro Cuban men and women. I suspect that these experiences led Olga to passionately care about the history of representation of Afro-Cuban women.
The elegant 1940s image of the Puig sisters challenges pervasive, and historically entrenched, stereotypical images of black Cuban women. Since 2009, I have been working with photomechanical postcards distributed to both Cuban and international audiences. In them, very few Afro Cuban women are shown as a pivotal part of Cuban cities and towns. Rather, early twentieth-century Afro Cuban women are usually shown in the margins. In one of these photographs, a black nanny stands in a doorway, purchasing milk for her white charges, yet a hanging textile obscures her face.
“The Milk Seller,” photomechanical postcard. Photograph taken in Cuba, postcard printed in New York, N.Y. Postmarked Feb 11, 1907.
In another postcard, the black woman is labelled “Cuban beggar” with her arm outstretched for help.
“Cuban Beggar,” photomechanical postcard. Undated, c. 1904-1912. Printed in the United States.
For the most part, postcards depict Afro Cuban women outside of the city entirely. Arguably, the black laundrywoman is the most pervasive motif.
“A Cuban Laundry,” photomechanical postcard. Dated Feb 19, 1912. Printed in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
This trope appears regularly among the semi-ethnographic series that seek to typify Cuba for North American audiences. Many of these images emphasize the Afro Cuban woman as a feature of the near-bucolic landscape. I write “near-bucolic” because the images all betray the radical amount of work the tropical landscape demands, with heavy laundry strewn about rocky, inland, fresh-water streams. One postcard image offers closer inspection of the laundrywomen. There, the Afro-Cuban laundrywomen have their sleeves rolled up, with little regard to formal attire of the time. This close-up image appears to have been quite popular, and the fuzzy manner of print betrays multiple editions of the postcard.
The Puig sisters insisted that I publish their fabulous 1940s photograph in order to challenge this imagery. Here, the sisters appear in the Bosque de la Habana, a recreational Havana City park. Facing the possible publication of the image, Angela exclaimed, joyously: “We won’t have ever gone anywhere but here! But our photograph will travel the world!” Olga, however, quite seriously slapped the table where the photograph, my laptop and the scanner lay. Her somewhat sharp and unexpected gesture was probably meant to emphasize that the image of her and her sisters, elegant and smart, posed in a Havana City park, was not just a striking portrait. The photograph stood for unacknowledged generations of accomplished women.
Featured Photograph: Clockwise from top: Neida, Ángela, Olga, Zenaida and Josefina Puig in the Bosque de la Habana. 1940s. Silver gelatin print. Collection of Olga Calvo Puig.
All images are the collection of the author unless otherwise noted.
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