Cuba as Mirror

I did not go to Cuba to remember Israel.

Cuba remembered it for me.

At first, it appeared as a journey. A colonial town. A road heading east. A bus station. A stranger leaning against a rusty metal stand with a bag on his shoulder. Rafael was not yet Rafael to me. He was only a body I had noticed the night before, sitting above the music, watching the dancers below, then disappearing into the dark before I could decide what kind of story he belonged to.

That is often how an image begins for me. Not as knowledge. Not as meaning. As suspicion.

A man appears twice. Once at night, once in daylight. The second time, the image asks to be followed.

I stopped the car.

There was an old woman with Che Guevara souvenirs, too many bags, too much life in her voice. There was Rafael in the back seat, holding her boxes on his knees, apologising with his eyes. There was my own face in the rear-view mirror, pretending to be only a traveller, when already the journey had begun to rearrange itself into something else.

I have always been drawn to these moments before the story admits what it is. A glance. A small hesitation. A body entering the car. The world looks ordinary, but something underneath has already started moving.

This is where looking becomes dangerous. Susan Sontag understood that the camera is never entirely innocent. Even before I lifted it, I was already arranging evidence. The road, the old woman, the stranger behind me, the bags on his knees, the mirror, my divided attention. I was offering a lift, but I was also entering a scene.

Later, in the restaurant opposite the station, Rafael ate chicken with his fingers. His fork stayed beside the plate, untouched. His shirt was half open. His chest was hairy. His body carried the smell of sweat, heat, road and hunger.

The memory arrived before I could defend myself.

My father returning from the port. The truck. Metal, oil, petrol, grease. The plate covered in silver foil. The heavy chair dragged across the kitchen floor. His body after work, washed but never fully separated from labour. His hunger. His noise. His authority. His underwear. His elbows on the white table. My mother standing behind him, waiting for the next demand.

I was no longer in Cuba.

I was in the kitchen of my childhood.

This is what I mean when I say that the photograph is not memory itself. It is a device that waits for memory to enter it. A body in one country opens a room in another. A smell becomes a cut. A gesture becomes evidence. The present does not replace the past. It disturbs it.

Cuba became a mirror, but not the kind that gives back a clean reflection. It gave me fragments. Rafael eating. Rafael running into a football field. Rafael's name shouted from every corner of the pitch. Rafael on horseback. Rafael laughing. Rafael disappearing. Rafael returning. Rafael touching my shoulder in the dark.

In him I saw the kind of masculinity I had feared as a child and desired as an adult.

That contradiction is the centre of Cuba, Love Story.

Cuba was macho, militant, physical, improvised, full of male display. Men stood in half circles, shirts open, smoking, laughing, performing. Men worked with animals, machines, ropes, tools, stories. Men entered danger almost casually, as if fear was something only a foreigner would confess. I recognised this theatre immediately. It was not Cuban only. It was also Israeli. It was the port, the army, the football field, the street, the family table. It was the education of the male body.

I had spent much of my life standing behind the white line.

At the football field, I watched Rafael run into the game as if entering his natural element. The players shouted his name. Rafael aquí. Rafael aquí. He belonged to the noise, to the sweat, to the rules I never fully understood. As a boy, I feared the ball, the shouting, the instinctive cruelty of boys dividing themselves into teams. I preferred the side streets, books, wandering, the possibility of discovering something hidden.

But in Cuba, from behind the same line, I found myself looking differently. The thing I once feared had become charged with desire. The field became a theatre. The players became signs. The body that excluded me as a child invited me back as an adult, but not without danger.

John Berger wrote about seeing as something learned before language. I think desire also begins before language. So does fear. I did not need to name what I was seeing in Rafael's body. I had already learned it elsewhere. In Israel. In childhood. In the army. In the kitchen. In the silence of men who spoke loudly because something in them was not allowed to speak at all.

This is why I do not trust simple categories.

Observer. Participant. Desire. Fear. Home. Foreign. Masculinity. Homoeroticism.

In Cuba, each word crossed into another.

I was never only looking. I was being looked at. I was never only recording. I was being changed by what I recorded. I was never only travelling through Cuba. I was travelling through my own unfinished archive.

The car accident made this clearer. After I left the football field, wounded by pride, I drove into a landscape I did not know. I was angry with Rafael, angry with myself, and perhaps still performing a version of my father's pride. Then the car hit the rock. The radiator split. Water ran into the dry sand. The red warning light began to flash.

Suddenly I was alone inside a scene.

This is where photography and cinema separate, and also where they meet. The still image would have held the car at its impossible angle, the dry road, the broken metal, the sky turning navy blue. The moving image would have kept the panic alive: my breath, the heat, the repeated stops, the water poured into the damaged radiator, the road refusing to explain itself.

Memory keeps both: stillness and movement, evidence and fiction, the visible and what cannot be photographed.

André Bazin understood photography as a defence against time, a way of preserving appearance against disappearance. But the image does not preserve the whole event. It preserves a trace, and the trace can become more dangerous than the event itself. It waits. It returns. It asks to be read again.

My father returned again there, not as violence this time, but as survival. His truck. The broken gear. The overheated radiator. His body under the machine. My hands holding his shirt, passing him tools, pretending we were a team. I hated what he represented, but I also inherited his instinct to repair the impossible long enough to keep moving.

When Rafael appeared again from the dark, shouting, confused, alive with emotion, I understood that the story had not ended when I left him. It had continued without me. He had his version. I had mine. The image had divided.

That is what memory does. It does not preserve one truth. It produces competing evidence.

Later that night, he touched my shoulder. He led me to the horse. We rode in silence through the dark. His body was behind mine, holding the reins. The river sounded before I saw it. Then he undressed and entered the water as if the night belonged to him.

I hesitated.

The child from the port returned. The boy who had been sprayed with water by men who expected him to remove his clothes and laugh with them. The boy who learned that the male body could be both game and humiliation. The boy who left the port and never fully returned.

Then I undressed too.

In the river with Rafael, under the stars, the same body that had once carried shame became something else. Not innocent. Not healed. Not simple. But free for a moment from the old instruction.

Cuba did not resolve my memories. It staged them.

That is why I call it a mirror.

Not because it showed me who I was, but because it showed me how many images I was made from: the soldier, the stranger, the son, the lover, the witness, the fugitive, the child behind the white line, the man entering the water at last.

Walter Benjamin wrote of memory as a theatre rather than a simple instrument for exploring the past. I understand that more now. Cuba was not the past. Cuba was the stage on which the past appeared, wearing another face, speaking another language, entering through another body.

My work begins in these unstable spaces. I follow roads. I gather clues. I photograph bodies, landscapes, rooms, accidents, thresholds. I do not always know what I am investigating until years later. The image arrives first. Meaning follows slowly, sometimes through writing, sometimes through editing, sometimes through the moving image, sometimes through the simple act of returning to a photograph after it has waited long enough.

Cuba was not only a place.

It was a darkroom.

It developed the image of Israel inside me.

The archive is not where I preserve Cuba. It is where Cuba continues to return me to myself.