In January 2017, with the inauguration looming in the US, and the Obama administration’s relaxed Cuba policies bound for the chopping block, I decided to flee the US for Havana– and take advantage of the closing window of opportunity to fly there directly from New York City while it was still easy, cheap, and legal.

It was a chance to see a slice of Cuban life, and meet neighbors on the other side of a US embargo– just two months after the death of the dictator who ruled it for half a century.

The excitement to finally be going to this mythical Caribbean city was conflicted though.  The 60 year-old US embargo (made even more severe in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act into law) was still fully in tact, and it continued to make the lives of millions of Cubans harder than it already was under their autocratic communist economy.

But in the opportunity to take a direct flight without a special visa, and within a few hours find yourself walking down Paseo del Prado meeting everyday Cubans, there was a sense that a new era might be opening— that some historic wrong was beginning to be corrected.

At the time— especially before the results of the 2016 US presidential election— it felt like a meaningful shift was unfolding in Cuba: domestic reforms had begun opening more categories of economic freedom and private entrepreneurship, internet access and speed was expanding to more citizens, and American tourists and businesses were visiting Cuba in record numbers. A reported 1.5 million visitors from the U.S. were received by Cuba in 2017, and total tourism on the island increased 16% from the year before.

What were Cubans making of all this?  Was there something new in the air?  Or was this just part of the same old ebb and flow– where real internal reform only happens at a glacial pace, and yankee policies come and go with each new administration?

For Americans like me, the embargo is an abstract term of foreign policy directed at a foreign regime that we can choose to ignore if it has a passing mention in the news that day. Even as visitors to the island, the twisted irony is that we’re hardly inconvenienced by the embargo – we can dress up and post selfies from downtown Havana romanticizing the bygone 1950s nightlife that symbolizes the very imperialism and inequality that made the revolution so popular in the first place; we can use our weaponized greenbacks to buy unlimited cigars, straw hats, mojitos and Airbnb stays; we can joy ride in old pastel-painted cars rigged up with soviet and tractor engines, and post more selfies to show the world that we’re experiencing an authentic old school Cuba– as if 60 years of communism and forced economic scarcity isn’t happening to the people we’re smiling at.

For the Cubans living in Cuba though– regardless of their political views, family history, or loyalty to the revolution–  the American embargo remains an inescapable 6 decade-long chokehold over the island, one that reaches right through the communist regime to the people themselves, affecting infrastructure investment, resources, hospitals, and everything down to the very staples of life like toothpaste, chicken, toilet paper, and equitable access to the digital world.

It was this dynamic and reality that was on my mind throughout my trip, and on my final two days I decided to document a few of the people I met that illuminated the kind of resilience and creativity everyday Cubans (and immigrants!) show in response to the embargo.

Soy No Cocinera is video profile on a Japanese woman who started a cafe in Old Havana; and Es Confuso (a short film) and Group Ariete (audio interviews) both came out of an afternoon I spent with a group of Havana-based writers.

Despite my attempt at avoiding anything construed as a political statement in these profiles, there is a theme that underlines these projects, and pretty much any story from Cuba:  that the economic hardships that Cubans deal with aren’t just the result of management decisions by various eras of the Cuban government, but by the adversarial and exploitative policies maintained year after year by the people of the United States— policies that are driven by the economic interests of a handful of wealthy American families, and the colonial-like dynamic between our countries that goes back to the aftermath of the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s.