Marcel Gomez Soria is a 13 year old child who carries a shoebox with him wherever he goes to protect his paper creations inside. In his backpack he has a crane, a bunch of flowers, a frog, a cat, a dragon, and a family of owls. This child from Trinidad is caught in the origami universe, a practice that doesn’t have deep roots in these parts of central south Cuba. “I like this more than playing baseball, spin tops or marbles,” he says in a low voice while he takes a blank sheet of paper to create a new figure. Marcel isn’t a boy of many words, he prefers to work in order to fight off the nerves and the blinking recorder. Since the day he showed them the hand-held fan (to combat the heat of the classroom) made from two cables, a battery, the motor of a toy boat and a blade made from an ice-cream pot, his family was aware of the boy’s inventiveness, but no one could have predicted that all of his skills would lead to paper. Marcel. Photo: Carlos Luis Sotolongo Puig “It all started about three years ago when I was sick in a...

From the moment she took out her camera, photographer Whitney Browne couldn’t keep a low profile for long in Trinidad, a city in central Cuba, where she had initially passed as just another tourist. The camera is an analogue Hasselblad, medium format, the same model with which Neil Armstrong recorded man’s arrival at the Moon in the 1961 Apollo 11 space mission. Browne is an artist who periodically publishes her work in, among other publications, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Time Out Magazine. A sample of Whitney Browne's work. After covering Havana, the young photographer, who prefers film in the time of digitalization, lost herself in the Trinidad that does not appear in guide books for foreigners: in the alley Sal-si-puedes ("Leave-if-you-can") in the neighbourhood of La Popa, in the arteries where people wearing Santero religious necklaces sit on the sidewalks to clean the rice they will cook for dinner, all the while discussing the human and the divine. She walked around with nothing more than the aim of registering the daily life further afield from the tourist set-up of the "museum city." The photographs would be included in an exhibition that she...