Not all roads lead to Rome. I believe they lead precisely to where we long to go—that place we return to time and again, shedding the damned objectivity that keeps us tethered to the trivial. That’s why one great writer called this city the city of columns, another spoke of Colonial and Neoclassical arches in her verses, and meanwhile the shadows played at touching one another beneath these silent witnesses of the city. Time went on, and through jolts and weathered wanderings, many others found their voice there.

“Sometimes the invisible, which possesses a heavy gravitation—and in that it differs from the unreal, which tends rather to levitate—reveals itself as limited, repetitive, with a regrettable tendency toward the commonplace.”

_{Fragment from Paradiso, a novel by José Lezama Lima.}

I remember that as I walked along our emblematic avenue just a few days ago, I smiled many times—because I had seen them before, but now I was truly discovering them, one by one… and admiring their beauty from a new perspective.

And the balconies, at times, offered me a toothless smile—no less genuine, no less a smile for it… The cocktails of time, sipped amid revelries and nocturnal hesitations, can only reveal their effects to the outsider, intoxicated by petrified beauty.

The continuous arcades lining both sides of this Prado Avenue, which leads us to the sea—or toward the National Capitol and its neighbouring buildings, such as the Gran Teatro de La Habana, depending on the direction your steps take—offer shade and ventilation, but they are also a passage between the public and the intimate. Of course, if you walk beneath them instead of down the centre of the avenue, you miss these marvels that cry out to you from above.

"Wrapped in his improvised mourning, scented with yesterday’s inks, the adolescent gazed at the city—strangely resembling, at this hour of reverberations and long shadows, a gigantic baroque candelabrum..."

_{A fragment from Chapter One of the novel El siglo de las Luces (The Century of Lights), by Alejo Carpentier.}

It’s a truly fascinating walk. To stroll along this stretch accompanied by someone who knows the city’s twists and turns, its hidden stories, is a divine sensory experience. I prefer to walk in silence—though that’s nearly impossible, as the avenue is a lively place, a meeting ground for art and other forms of community-based cultural expression.

“Those who never saw it will never be able to imagine what Havana was like at that time: a little Vienna, a miniature Paris, a distillation of Buenos Aires… For Havana was all of that—colour, splendour, refinement."

_{Excerpt from Fe de Vida, a novel by Dulce María Loynaz.}

That day, I saw two newlyweds posing for photographs atop a convertible. In front of the Prado Marriage Palace, the scene drew everyone’s gaze. Meanwhile, on one of the avenue’s porous stone benches, two men played chess in silence. Children clattered their skates and skateboards across the polished surface of the Prado, while vendors of sweet biscuits, canned sodas, and flavoured fried crisps kept watch over their carts—likely retired from some former state-run shop.

😃

Everything can appear as rough and rugged as it is full of glory. That glory which seduces us, because it dwells within us—because perhaps, at times, we’ve forgotten that we are eternal travellers between worlds, beings who transmute sorrow into joy at the speed of light, as if memory were simply a thread, another fragmented excuse that keeps us alive.

All these images were taken on October 22nd… who knows how many tears and how many smiles were unfolding at once, while I cheerfully pressed the shutter of my camera.