A pair of worn feet rest on cracked pavement, framed by rusted ironwork and peeling concrete. The broken sandal, the dried skin, the dirt every detail speaks louder than a face ever could. This is not just a portrait of a person; it's a portrait of a condition, of a life beneath the line of sight.

**“Donde Caen los Pies”** is a study in human fragility and systemic invisibility. Captured in Old Havana, the photograph offers a quiet meditation on endurance **the kind built from pavement, silence, and resignation.** The absence of identity becomes a presence in itself, challenging the viewer to consider the value of what’s usually overlooked.

This image is part of a broader body of work documenting **Cuban street survival and dignity**, focused on lives lived close to the ground in stillness, in waiting, in resistance.

Donde Caen los Pies

Puerto Rican salsa legend **Gilberto Santa Rosa** extends a microphone toward **Luis Alfonso Hermosilla**, a young Venezuelan-born autistic musician, as they perform together on stage. Luis, dressed in a tailored blue blazer, plays his maracas with determination and joy fully immersed in the rhythm, the light, and the moment.

**“Un Son para Todos”** captures a rare harmony: not just of music, but of inclusion, dignity, and human connection. More than a concert image, it’s a quiet celebration of visibility of what happens when music embraces difference, and legends make space for rising voices.

This photograph is part of a larger exploration of **Latin musical legacy, neurodiversity, and shared stages** where rhythm becomes a universal language, and representation takes center spotlight.

Un Son para Todos

Bathed in golden light, **Descemer Bueno** stands at the center of an ethereal glow his form grounded, yet haloed by a radiance that feels both divine and cinematic. Captured in Miami, this portrait transcends celebrity or personality; it transforms its subject into a luminous symbol of grace, legacy, and quiet strength.

**“El Ángel de Diciembre”** is not just a photograph it's a reverent pause. The lighting sculpts more than flesh; it carves presence, memory, and myth. With minimal staging and maximum emotion, the piece frames Descemer Bueno as a modern icon: humble, yet lit like a saint.

This portrait is part of an ongoing series examining Latin artists through the lens of light and reverence blending editorial precision with poetic symbolism.

El Ángel de Diciembre

Strutting across the concrete with confidence, a rooster disrupts the expected flow of an urban space. Captured in Downtown Miami a landscape of glass, cement, and rules this unexpected subject reclaims the frame with wild charm. The posture is proud, the pace deliberate: not just walking, but **performing defiance**.

**“Sin Permiso, Pero con Estilo”** is a playful and subversive meditation on migration, resilience, and visibility. The rooster becomes both symbol and stand-in: for immigrants, for outsiders, for anyone who enters a system not designed for them and does so with unapologetic flair.

In a city of constant motion, this image freezes one act of fearless individuality.

Sin Permiso, Pero con Estilo

A solitary fishing vessel floats in stillness off the coast of Santa Fe, Havana. Bathed in violet light and mirrored perfectly on the surface of the sea, the boat becomes a symbol of pause an anchor not just in water, but in time. The symmetry is calming yet haunting, as though the horizon might swallow it at any moment.

**“Ancla Silenciosa”** is an exploration of stillness and solitude. The image blends documentary and dreamscape, echoing the dual life of Cuban fishermen: drifting between survival and surrender, presence and absence.

It invites the viewer to meditate on the in-between **that fragile balance between movement and rest, arrival and departure, silence and memory.**

Ancla Silenciosa

Under the glow of a streetlamp in Old Havana, a man sits at the edge of the sidewalk, cradling his head in his hands. Beside him, a worn leather bag a symbol of waiting, movement, or perhaps survival. The harsh orange cast of sodium lights paints the scene in cinematic warmth, while the blurred right side of the frame suggests something unseen, approaching, or passing him by.

**“Esperando la Madrugada”** is a visual meditation on stillness and weight the kind carried quietly by bodies in motionless states. Shot in the heart of Havana’s historic core, the image speaks to **exhaustion, solitude, and the unspoken narratives of a night not yet ended**.

Part of an ongoing body of work exploring Cuban urban emotion, this photograph invites viewers to pause at the border of presence and absence a tension felt by anyone who’s ever waited for a change that may never come.

Esperando la Madrugada

A white dove caught mid-motion in front of a weathered fence its wings blurred into abstraction, clawing at the surrounding darkness. **“Alas Contra la Jaula”** captures a fleeting, violent grace: a gesture that feels both accidental and choreographed, both free and imprisoned.

Shot in Miami, the image speaks to the experience of cultural and psychological confinement within a place often associated with escape and freedom. The bird’s motion becomes a metaphor for diasporic struggle **the tension between visible space and invisible borders**.

Through negative space, light, and disorientation, this piece invites viewers to question what freedom looks like when the cage isn't made of bars, but of silence, history.

Alas Contra la Jaula

A bolt of lightning rips through the sky over the Gulf of Mexico, casting a supernatural glow between Havana’s iconic high-rise buildings. The city below, half asleep and half aglow, remains still as nature declares itself above. Captured from a high vantage point in Vedado, this image blends the raw force of a tropical storm with the modernist architecture of Cuba’s evolving skyline.

**“Torre y Trueno”** embodies contrast between natural chaos and man-made order, between illumination and shadow, between the silence of power outages and the hum of buildings that resist it. It captures **a rare alignment of light, tension, and cinematic mood**, revealing Havana not as nostalgic past, but living present.

Torre y Trueno

Cuban hip-hop icon **El B** (from _Los Aldeanos_) grips the mic with intensity during a live performance in Miami. His tattooed arm and commanding presence fill the frame, embodying decades of underground resistance and poetic fire.

Look closely, and you’ll notice **two drops of sweat trailing down his cheek** so precisely placed they could be mistaken for **tears**. In this fleeting moment, sweat, pain, and passion converge, blurring the line between physical exertion and emotional release.

**“El B en Vivo”** is part of an ongoing series documenting the cultural pulse of Cuban artists in exile a visual tribute to lyricism, protest, and resilience.

El B Live

Beneath a towering storm cell illuminated by golden lightning, **El Capitolio de La Habana** glows like a shrine to resilience. The contrast is haunting: nature’s fury swelling above, and human-made brilliance standing defiant below. Shot at night during an electrical storm, this image captures a fleeting collision between the cosmic and the civic thunderclouds as gods, and the Capitol as a beacon.

**“La Tormenta y el Templo”** asks: _Who holds the power the architect or the atmosphere?_ It speaks to fragility disguised as strength, to the grandeur of nations shadowed by uncontrollable forces.

The composition evokes cinematic suspense and political metaphor, creating a surreal visual dialogue between earth and sky, control and chaos, monument and myth.

La Tormenta y el Templo

A green anole clamps its jaws around a smaller lizard, suspended against the rough textures of tree bark. Caught mid-hunt, the predator’s vibrant emerald body contrasts starkly with the muted browns of its surroundings. The action is brutal yet elegant a fleeting encounter captured in perfect tension.

**“Dominio Verde”** is a meditation on instinct and survival. It highlights the raw choreography of nature, where beauty and violence often intersect in the same breath. The image frames not only ecological truth but also a metaphor for power, control, and the silent battles occurring every day in unseen corners of the world.

Dominio Verde

A group of pigeons sit confined inside a weathered green cage on a sunlit street in Old Havana. In the distance, the Cuban flag ripples above the heads of pedestrians, tricycle taxis, and the blurred rhythm of the city. At first glance, a quiet street scene — but within the frame lies a layered metaphor.

**“Cuba Libre”** contrasts the idea of freedom with the lived reality of entrapment. The birds traditionally symbols of peace and liberty become stand-ins for a people historically constrained by walls both visible and invisible. Meanwhile, the flag waves freely, casting patriotic pride over a narrow, worn-out alleyway.

This image explores the tension between **national identity, surveillance, and the fragile illusions of freedom**, prompting viewers to reconsider what “liberty” truly looks like in everyday life.

CUBA LIBRE

Two flies, mid-copulation, cling to a textured pastel wall barely noticeable against the faded lime surface. **“Ciclo”**magnifies the overlooked, placing reproduction and life force at the center of an abstract green void.

The composition plays with silence and intimacy. At first glance, the image reads as an accidental brushstroke or minimalist painting until closer inspection reveals a visceral truth. The photograph questions what we consider artful, beautiful, or worth preserving, and how even the smallest, most dismissed elements of life contain choreography, balance, and meaning.

This work functions as both **biological poetry and social metaphor**: a quiet rebellion against the sanitized, polished view of existence.

Ciclo

This photograph captures a decaying urban corridor, fractured by time and silence. Tucked within the frame, almost forgotten, the iconic Cuban phrase _"Socialismo o Muerte"_ (_Socialism or Death_) is barely legible on a rusted steel panel. The surrounding textures crumbling concrete, exposed piping, unlit entryways underscore a confrontation between ideology and abandonment.

**“Socialismo o Muerte”** is not only a visual record but a quiet critique. It juxtaposes the permanence of revolutionary slogans with the transience of public faith. The image echoes themes of **political erosion, visual memory, and the ruins of belief**, inviting viewers to contemplate what lingers after propaganda fades.

Socialismo o Muerte

A man sleeps on a concrete step in the heart of Old Havana shirt torn, hat collapsed at his side, body curled in a fetal position. His bracelets and tattoos hint at a past life rich in identity, now buried beneath layers of grime, fatigue, and societal neglect.

This image is a stark meditation on **visibility and erasure** how entire lives are lived in plain sight, yet remain unseen. “El Reposo del Invisible” invites the viewer to confront urban poverty not as an aesthetic or abstraction, but as an intimate truth. It honors dignity in vulnerability and seeks to humanize the marginalized.

The composition’s symmetry, muted palette, and raw stillness add weight to the narrative making the subject not a symbol, but a soul.

El Reposo del Invisible

Captured on the streets of Little Havana the **day after Fidel Castro’s death was announced (November 26, 2016)**, this photograph freezes a moment of emotional gravity and generational memory. A woman, draped in Afro-Cuban religious beads and sunglasses, gazes upward as crowds surround her waving Cuban and American flags. The atmosphere is both celebratory and contemplative a release decades in the making.

This image reflects the deep spiritual, political, and cultural resonance of the Cuban exile community. It speaks to collective trauma, survival, and the power of expression through movement, sound, and presence.

Add

Hazeem Velazquez Morales

Opportunities

For Artists

ArtConnect

Support