Photos by Nester Nuñez
Photo Feature by Nester Nuñez
HAVANA TIMES – Every city has an invisible boundary that rarely appears on maps and is not marked by a wall. It is the place where the pavement ends, public transportation does not exist, and services arrive intermittently or simply do not arrive at all. Beyond that boundary, the outskirts begin: a territory that belongs to the city but lives by different rules.
For decades, these neighborhoods also held onto a promise: the possibility of gradually improving one’s circumstances. In many cases, what began as a precarious home built with wooden planks, cardboard, or recycled materials could, over the years, be transformed into a sturdier house. A wooden wall could be replaced with masonry; a zinc roof could be replaced with something more durable.
It was a slow transformation, achieved through hard work and sacrifice. However, Cuba’s prolonged economic crisis has brought that progress to a halt. For many families, the outskirts have ceased to be a stepping stone toward better living conditions and have instead become a place where daily efforts are barely enough to maintain what already exists.
On the outskirts, time is marked by the sunrise, the level of the river, the right moment to cast a fishing net, the growth of a plantain grove, or the care of animals that supplement the family’s food supply. There, bicycles and horses remain everyday means of transportation, while people carry water in buckets or run hoses and electrical cables to make up for the lack of infrastructure that is taken for granted in other neighborhoods.
Far from the image of a stagnant or resigned community, the outskirts reveal constant activity. Each day is filled with small tasks that make it possible to sustain life: repairing a fishing net, making charcoal, planting crops, raising chickens or rabbits, fetching water, and improvising solutions.
These photographs were taken in a neighborhood north of the Yumurí River in Matanzas. Yet they could just as easily belong to the margins of many cities around the world. Because the outskirts are not merely a geographic location; they are the experience of living on the edge, where the city stops making promises and people begin finding their own solutions for nearly everything they need to keep going.
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