Discovering a Ghost Ship in Cienfuegos, Cuba

It was my last day in the city of Cienfuegos, down in southern Cuba. The sun was already sinking toward its rest. Cañibano, Gonzalito, and I were wandering La Reina Cemetery. It must have been for the umpteenth time. We were trying to use up the last rolls of film. When we traveled in Cuba, the length of our journey always depended on the rolls we had brought with us. That’s when a boy of about twelve shared a tremendous secret. He said, “Back there, past the last graves, I’ve got a ghost ship hidden!”

A ghost ship? That sounded like the start of a photographic adventure. Off we went! We ran after the boy and, suddenly, through a curtain of bushes, it appeared—majestic, the famous ship itself.

We split up right away: Cañibano and I ran to the north side (where we could see the port side), while Gonzalito went to starboard. I remember nothing except what my left eye saw through the viewfinder of my battered Nikon F2, fitted with a 28mm lens. I had just five frames left on an old roll of infrared film… I pressed the shutter five times, and then came that dreaded sound: the roll was finished.

But frame 36 of that negative already carried the image dearest to me—the one most published, the one I’ve sold the most in galleries: photo number 199605113, and on the sleeve of the negative, in my handwriting, the words “Little Boy with Little Boat.”

I returned several times to visit “my ship.” In this image, I posed before that beloved friend for the very last time in 2004. It was just a few months before being deported from my homeland.

“The Difficulty of Covering Totalitarian Cuba Honestly” – Wall Street Journal February 9, 2012