Steven’s Cuba Blog

Faces of Cuba - footage and interviews from The Island

I’ve been doing some video work at home for an unrelated project, and came across some footage that I shot just over a year ago in Cuba. I wanted to use it as the beginning of a documentary about Cuba, a sort of question and answer session with everyday Cubans I’d met. It was an effort to document Cuba from the perspective of the people who live there.

As these things tend to do, it got buried behind other projects and work that I later focused on. Instead of letting the video collect dust, though, I’ve decided to put it all up here. The three posts below contain most of the footage, lightly edited.

The questions were very straightforward and apolitical - jobs, activities, plans. Dreams. The footage is mostly shot while traveling or walking around a city.

Lastly - and most importantly - I’ve decided to release all of the footage into the public domain. You can take the video, remix it, edit it, use it for your own purposes, etc. It belongs to the Public Domain. It would be cool if you could drop me an email or a comment if you do decide to use it for your own work, though - just to satisfy my curiosity.

You can download the entire clip (ignore most of the captions; they’re no longer valid) here at the Internet Archive.

Faces Of Cuba 1 - Havana, Cuba

This is the Havana chapter of the footage from “Faces of Cuba I”, a documentary which I decided not to release.

Instead, I’m putting the raw footage up into the public domain. Hopefully someone will find it useful and / or interesting.

Faces Of Cuba 2 - Trinidad de Cuba

This is the second chunk of lightly edited footage from the Faces of Cuba I reel. It is from Trinidad de Cuba and the surrounding area, just over a year ago.

It is in the public domain.

Faces Of Cuba 3 - Villa Clara

The third and last piece of footage from Faces of Cuba I. This was filmed in Villa Clara (mostly Santa Clara). It’s released into the Public Domain.