Havana: Leandro Feal

Havana, a solo show by Leandro Feal, is focused on a series that documents life surrounding the Roma bar. Themes such as sexual liberation, the cores of intimate and private freedom, characteristics of collectivization and normalization of these experiences, basically a whole counterculture that might even be included inside the greater narrative of Cuban identity. 

Why the Roma bar? Because it is one of the few private businesses that has settled itself as a space not only for consumption but also for cultural expression, a site that brings together a large part of the current Cuban artistic avant-garde as well as international artists, celebrities and local characters of intellectuals and different generations. But most of all a group of young people who has decided to have confidence on an image of a cosmopolitan Cuba, different, but at the same time with the authentic stamp of a context marked by its political and economic characteristics. 

The Roma bar is also one of the foundations where you can see the atmosphere of cultural and economic openness that has developed in recent years in Cuba. Places like Studio 54, Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Factory from the rave scene in Manchester, Cafe Lhemitz from the photos by André Petersen, or the mythical bars of the Movida Madrileña are proof of the importance of this kind of sites in the process of evolution and expansion towards new cultural sensitivities. 

The series of photographs around Roma bar are part of a wider work in which Leandro Feal has been photographing the most relevant events of an economic and social opening-up process in the Havana of the last two years.