In January 2017, with a polarizing inauguration looming in the U.S., and the Obama Administration’s newly relaxed policies on Cuba seemingly on the chopping block with the incoming administration, I decided to spend a week in Havana and take advantage of the opportunity to fly directly to the island 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 U.S. embargo, just two months after the death of the dictator who had ruled the island for half a century.

My excitement to finally be going to this mythical Caribbean city was conflicted though, by the knowledge that the 60 year-old US embargo on Cuba remained intact and still had a punishing impact on people there, from chronic food, medicine and materials shortages, to foreign investment on the island.

But in the opportunity to fly directly to Havana from New York 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 was being opened— 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 private entrepreneurship and economic freedom, internet speed and access 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 this?

For Americans like me, the embargo is probably an abstract foreign policy– directed at a totalitarian regime that we can choose to ignore if we see it mentioned in the media, or hardly even be inconvenienced by when traveling to Cuba.  As visitors to the island, we can dress up and romanticize a bygone 1950s Havana nightlife – as if 60 years of communism and forced economic scarcity didn’t just happen to millions of people; we can post selfies on joy rides in old rigged-up pastel-painted vintage American cars; and we can use our weaponized greenbacks to have unlimited mojitos, cigars and airbnb stays, to show the world that we’re experiencing a true Cuba.

For Cubans living in Cuba, the embargo has been an inescapable 6 decade-long chokehold over the island, one that reaches right through the communist regime, right to the people themselves, affecting infrastructure investment, resources, and everything down to the very staples of life that may be available that day.

It was this dynamic and reality that was on my mind throughout my trip, and on my final two days I decided to do two spontaneously conceived projects with the small mirrorless camera and audio recorder I brought:  a video profile on a Japanese chef and single mother running a cafe in Old Havana, and a mixed media project with a group of Cuban writers I met after a chance encounter I had with one of their founders at the Fundación Alejo Carpentier.

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