Tracing my Family History in Cuba

I came to NYU's Havana, Cuba study abroad program in January 2023 with the intention to find out about the life my grandparents had lived there before they moved to America during the Cuban Revolution. I came in not knowing anything except that I had find out by looking through a pile of their old documents in Spanish that I could not understand. Throughout my time there, I was able to translate each document, find out more of what life my family lived, and visit some of the places they had moved through (including their old houses and cemetery). It was an incredible experience walking through the streets of Cuba with a very different lens that my family had. I got to appreciate how hard my grandparents had worked to make a living and imagine what my life would have been like if my grandparents decided to stay in Cuba. In NYU's program, instructed by Professor Alexis Gambis, I was able to exhibit my project at the top floor of the Ludwig Foundation in Cuba. Below is my project that I was so grateful to have the opportunity to make and exhibit.

Below are images of how my project was displayed at the Ludwig foundation. The way the project was set up was that you, the visitor in the art exhibit, can go on my computer yourself and navigate through each folder on my desktop to find out more about my family's History in Cuba. Whatever the visitor clicked on would also be displayed on the TV screen above my computer. There was also a table filled with all my family's old photographs in Cuba and all the documents that I had marked up and highlighted during my time there.

At the bottom of this page you will find a screen recording of what was in each folder on my desktop. The recording is very fast because there was so much information I had, so if you want to really look at each person's folder you can pause the video where you see fit.

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