“Cities do not respect those who cannot create, but growling,” Martí wrote in Patria newspaper on August 20, 1892. And designer Lázaro Bermúdez and art historian Daymi Coll, who conceived from Toronto, Canada, more precisely from an apartment at the intersection of Eglinton and Spadina streets, a website, a site devoted to mysticism and everyday life in the Cuban capital has never lacked creativity.
Daymi and Lazaro understood that the image of the city where they both were born and raised should not be built under partial and sectarian beliefs, and they decided to design, supply and place into circulation, from Eglinton, a project covered in that other Marti’s thought, also made out of Cuba, regarding “the corner of the house is the best, with the majesty of free thinking, and the moderate treasure of cunning honesty, and a chorus as a friend with a cup of coffee”. Lazaro, Daymi and I sat around the coffee to talk at length about what living outside Havana and continue sweating, creating and dreaming of it means.
A year ago, when www.havanastreetview.com emerged, I saw you immersed in the foundational enthusiasm and several ambitious ideas. Was it a page more of Cuban nostalgia and memorabilia made by and for exiles? Which were the first and greatest successes?
Lázaro Bermúdez: -Indeed, there is a lot of nostalgia in this. I can not neither want to deny that distance has played its role, not only by the known lament of the emigrants that force them to come back, or to never fully go away, but distance also provides a global view. Access to the web world has allowed participating and belonging to the globalized culture with its strengths and weaknesses, and to study large communities with effective ways of displaying information to be consumed. And most important of all: we have witnessed how it looks and is treated the theme of Cuba from a country that produces the highest annual number of visitors to the island.
Daymi Coll: The page emerged conditioned by the fact that two of the founders, Lazaro and I, lived outside Cuba and had access to Internet and other means of communication. First, we tried to create a cultural product that had us connected to all with Cuban creative production. I think that in addition to nostalgia, the need of creating something genuine on Havana encourages us, which was and remains the dominant theme as a city, space, metaphor. We were trying to consolidate a more complete and realistic picture, both on the web and beyond, through initiatives to ensure moving ideas and establishing exchanges.
To what extent do makers consider that this page has consolidated a personality, a characteristic flowing into the ocean of proposals from the web?
Daymi Coll: As a product it is new on the website. It did not exist before. Search on our city often refers to tourist and political issues, but it rarely have to do with the traditions and culture. We have taken some important steps of recognition. Exchanges have been established with professors and universities. Site visits have remained stable, and from many different countries. The greatest successes achieved in a year of work are displayed in the image, the programming and the definition of each of the sections and the relationship between them. The presentation in Havana, presentation and results of the first competition of design, narrative and journalism were impulses to be included into Havana cultural landscape. We are still implementing strategies that allow us to establish a more substantial production annually.
Lázaro Bermúdez: I think it’s early to measure how much we have achieved. The achievements today are more internal than external. It is a very experimental, atypical project in the combination of spaces and concepts. It is not yet known or is unclear to the public what its purpose is. It is clear for us who have grown up with it; we still have to work on promotion through every means, as well as funding strategies. The current web scenario referred to Havana and Cuba in general is still a calm sea, although there are spaces with good profile and personality. Cuba has been absent from the web , or very weakly present (in areas such as tourism, politics and culture), and secondly the spaces created out of Cuba are mainly focused on news and opinion spectrum in the dispute for monopolizing “the other voice”. In this environment, we define ourselves as a community of content , open platform that brings together various functions but we are no a press organ or purely of opinion . We are not a magazine or a social network. Community is a place of coexistence between individuals who share a common interest, that is Havana in our case, and it is necessary to explain that it is the city inside and outside its physical limits.
How and who decides the type of work or illustration to publish? What are the measuring sticks? How would you define the look and aesthetic and design parameters of a magazine noted for its visuality?
Daymi Coll: The work of the image, design and photography has been in the hands of Lazaro. And without doubt, the visuality of the site has a lot of power and I think it has been well conceived and designed, from all the parameters required by an identity manual. I think the picture , in conjunction with the contents, is among the happiest achievements of the project, and has given it a unique personality.
Lázaro Bermúdez: The contents are based on ideas the team brings. Ideas abound, the tough is to implement them. We try to consolidate information on specific topics such as Art and Design, Journalism and Literature, Architecture and Urbanism, Music and Audiovisual. Each issue carries at least one article per space, multiple images per item and interactive panoramas of the city. It is a great display that takes time and resources. Then within the site contents are associated according to municipalities, themes, and are also related in a dynamic of greater interest than traditional menus. A single conditioning governs everything: Havana is the only protagonist. Our website has a solid foundation in the image, photography, and of course in design. Its founding team is mostly composed of specialists in visual arts, curators, designers and programmers, so the result could not be different.
What have been the bases of the relationship between the makers of the page and its loyal collaborators ? How they have managed to establish a stable and systematic dynamics with people who live thousands of miles away and in different countries? What importance do you give to this platform for meeting and exchange among Cubans from outside and inside?
Daymi Coll: We are colleagues, friends, and we have tried to establish a stable dynamics of communication, although the process has been complex. In May last year, the group set to Joanna Castillo as coordinator in Havana. She manages to raise contents for each of the sections, establishing contacts and collaborations and is also in charge of productive logistics. Although I still believe that we are in an experimental side of the project, so we have achieved in recent months founding an area of more dynamic collaboration that has allowed the addition of new young intellectuals and specialists.
Lázaro Bermúdez: The term Community would be the shortest and most comprehensive answer to this question. Havana unites all Cubans, even if you are from the eastern side of the country and you hate Havana people. The dynamics is based on sharing the love for the city wherever you are. Havana Streetview from the initial idea wanted to be that necessary space for reunion, tolerance, a virtual model of the city hung as a piñata containing all presences: from the content we produce, the “gringos” fanatics to our culture, and even more important, the evidence of our happy exchanges.
How could you describe the promotional presentation of the second year of a project that, from what I’ve seen, it takes 365 days very attentive to certain undeniably Cuban social, psychological and especially cultural contexts?
Lázaro Bermúdez: Our second year will be emphatic in the promotion and dissemination of the project where possible. Previously we were worried, and now we remain concerned, about our practical operation, both of reviewers and the site functionality, i.e., the technical part of it. We are engaged in an online project devoted to a city virtually disconnected. T he dynamics of communications overwhelms us, the difficulty to meet dates and all the technical and administrative side of the page that is done in Havana. But I also think that difficulties are part of the charm. We continue, in social networks, replicating the work of other spaces that objectively speak of the city, sources that offer verifiable data not permeated by hate. Our goal is to add presence, and give credit where it is due.
Daymi Coll: I agree with Lázaro that the most important thing for us in this second year of life would be establishing ourselves with in Havana community, achieving real interaction with its natural audience, and if not through the website, then by initiatives on land, and adapting ourselves to the conditions the city has. Secondly, I believe we must continue working with the same impetus to achieve systematize the new content in topics as ambitious and diverse as photography, art, literature, architecture, music, cinema, community and directory, but all this can be achieved only through the dialogue and regular exchange with our fans and their community.
If you multiply by three the desire asked with the eyes closed, in front of the birthday candle, on the first anniversary of Habanastreetview, what would be the third wish, the imperative for you to manage to continually update this magazine almost newborn?
Daymi Coll: That we could implement each of the ideas that we have devised, that the promotion and establishment of the site in Havana to cease being a pipe dream, and to establish a more enriching process of collaboration and financing.
Lázaro Bermúdez: That the miracle of internet access for Cubans to happen. That would be the first and only desire.
