My Cuban Family

Ever since learning the word familia as a child, I longed to visit my father’s country. I became the first in my immediate family in close to four decades to travel to Cuba. Wide-eyed and 28 years old, I was eager to meet relatives with whom ties had frayed because of distance, politics and the passage of time. When I arrived at the childhood home of my father in the rural Holguin province, I was surrounded by a sea of Cuban relatives and felt a rush of excitement. I had hoped to take photographs that reflected my optimism about making new connections with my family. But as my two-week stay unfolded, the realities of the differences between us tempered that optimism--and my photographs betrayed the difficulty of bridging a gulf wider than I imagined.