In 1968, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced the confiscation of all remaining small businesses on the island without compensation to their owners. Ironically, most owners had benefitted from the Revolution and considered themselves loyal supporters because after the government nationalized foreign and large-scale counterparts in August 1960, they faced no competition. One of the few exceptions to this rule were photographers. Although their businesses were technically illegal, even government schools relied on private photographers to take kids’ annual pictures throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Another guaranteed market included fifteen-year-old girls. Since at least the 1940s and 1950s, middle- and even working-class parents had traditionally paid to have a series of “glamour shots” taken at private studios. In the 1970s, when they were wearing school uniforms, most young people wore clothes they or their moms made themselves, often out of already used, vintage pieces. The absence of any special dresses for sale that were not bridal gowns and the rationing of material transformed most quiceañeras’ glamour shots into “head shots”. As my cousins Maeté Rosado Amores and her sister Nery’s quince pictures from those years show, the almost exclusive use of black and white film rather than color also testified to Cuba’s austere conditions, despite its full membership in the Soviet Eastern bloc. Personal collection of Lillian Guerra.
