Havana is an open, feverish, bustling city; an extroverted and sensual city that impudently throws many intimacies and frustrations, joys and hardships on its streets.
However, the Cuban capital is, at the same time, a city with its limits and introversions, with its fears and cautions. A grilled city.
Havana’s grilles have been, from their earliest years, artifice and ornament. But also usefulness and protection.
Superb, exquisite, beautiful grilles, the work of experienced masters that have adorned and protected for decades, or centuries, windows and doors, corridors and balconies, mansions and neighborhood houses, old fortresses and gardens.
Iron grilles of illustrious buildings, preserved or in disrepair, and also covered with wooden balusters in old stately windows.
At the same time, over time, new generations of grilles have been born in the city. They do not exhibit the luxury of yesteryear and put use before beauty, although some do not give up an aesthetic profile.
Pragmatic grilles, without rendering accounts and contingencies. Crisis grilles, to safeguard home assets rather than to show off from the outside.
This is how they coexist today: simple and luxurious, solid and flimsy, preserved and in ruins, dealing with rust and precariousness or protected by the better fortune of their owners.
Our photojournalist Otmaro Rodríguez brings us closer to the grilles of Havana this Sunday with his lens. Today, through the grilles, is another graphic journey through a city of contrasts and contradictions that is now entering the year of its 505th anniversary.
