The characters of Reinventing Cuba

Here is Gerry Hadden’s insight into some of the people we profile in Reinventing Cuba.

Yoan

Yoan’s shy charm won everyone on the CCTV crew over. He’s still basically a kid in a man’s – a big man’s – body. Hanging out with him you see how much he loves his mom, dad and little sister, and how supportive they’ve been in nurturing his exceptional baseball talents. Yoan immediately said yes when we asked if we could visit his home. His mom Judith went to buy us fresh bread at 5am that day, to be able to offer us a proper breakfast. Talk about generous. Their life, it seemed, was an open book. You could also see how much Yoan wants to give something back to his parents. If he makes money one day his goal is to buy them their own house.

Robin

Our first sighting of Robin: 10 in the morning, stumbling out of bed at his home office, a can of Coca Cola in his hand. And a what-a-night-I-had-last-night grin. The guy’s hip, a night owl. He’s also young and ambitious enough to keep up the pace when the sun’s up. Robin has this vision of making his magazine, Vistar, Cuba’s Rolling Stone. He’s covering all the right events, attending all the right parties and seems to have more connections than a Google server-farm. And yet there he is, several times a day, sitting outside the tourist hotels downloading his emails; Cubans don’t have home access to the internet. Robin, in a word, is driven. You’d have to be to try to start an online magazine in a country that’s virtually offline.

The characters of Reinventing Cuba

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