Cuba during the pandemic – photo essay

Photographer Leysis Quesada Vera describes life during the pandemic in Havana’s Los Sitios neighbourhood. She is a photographer based in Ecuador. Her work is supported and produced by the Magnum Foundation, with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Magnum Foundation is a nonprofit organisation that expands creativity and diversity in documentary photography. Through grant making and mentorship, Magnum Foundation supports a global network of social justice and human rights-focused photographers and experiments with new models for storytelling

Los Sitios lies to the south of Centro, the careworn barrio that gives Havana its coarse voice and whose northern limit is the Malecon, the famous corniche set against the Florida Straits.

The photographer Leysis Quesada Vera describes Los Sitios – her neighbourhood – as home to “people who work with tourists but not in the hotels. They sell cigars, probably illegally, clean the houses where tourists stay, sell souvenirs.”

Tracers, medical students who screen households and undertake contact tracing, confer in the street

The last months of a pregnancy

Clockwise from top left: a bread queue forms in the morning; a woman collects chlorine from trucks disinfecting the streets; a retired woman works as a seamstress to make a living; a man sells stools in Reunion Street

Customers queue for cotton candy

Entry is barred to quarantined blocks in Los Sitios neighbourhood

A child is sad after almost a year of confinement at home

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