All around Cuba people sit outside their houses or businesses, taking advantage of any wafts of cool air. People sit on steps, boxes, curb-stones, wooden stools and if they’re lucky, a favourite chair. Often these chairs look like home-made affairs, ingeniously bent lengths of rebar or other steel rod, forming a basic structure sometimes adorned with flourishes. They are mostly very old, worn, re-painted and above all, well-used.
Havana – a new folding aluminium chair in the book market.Havana – a sturdy imported design, a building site guard’s chairHavana – building site guard!Havana – lovely example of a rebar chair with an extra flight of fancy by the maker.Havana – a 1960’s imported padded chair to sit on in your room behind the grille on a hot night watching the world go by.Cienfuegos – a modern chair, plastic-coated to protect it from the salt waterCienfuegos – green decking – so paint your cast iron benches orange!Cienfuegos – the basic aluminium tube chair have been strung with green plastic tubing, now over-stretched by so much use, today the occupant has chosen a green blouse to complement her chair. A glimpse of a shapely white chair just beyond with a good thick orange-coloured cushion.Trinidad – A scruffy old chair  with many coats of paint and a new cushion, love the blue.Trinidad – a comfortable padded, folding chair, with arms too!Sancti Spiritus – the only rocking chair I saw of this type, it is a fine example, strong and with good details, arms too.Santi Spiritus – a delightful chair making a good shadow tracing on the ground but no seat!The owner of this chair, one of four, is standing just to the right, she invited us into her home to see her religious shrines but I loved the fabulously curvy chairs.Havana – This broken chair is also in her kitchen right by the others, its an interesting design but the stringing is to loose now, I suspect it was her husband’s and he’s no longer there to sit in it.Havana – A very similar chair but with steel rods instead of plastic tubing, this one belongs to a Tarot card reader who invited us into her home,t has an interesting little flourish along the top.Havana – another chair belong to the tarot reader, this is a great rocker and the green tubing is a good contrast to the aluminium tube frame, bolted together.Havana – a bench made from iron strapping, – again the first i’d seen. It was in a zoned off district belong to a revolutionary group.Havana – another chair in the Revolutionaries street, tucked away in a bath set into a niche in a wallVinales – a friend photographed this one for me as I didn’t make it to Vinales, it belonged to the tobacco grower whom they visited. It reminds me of summer, tennis and lemonade! And there’s a face in the back, eyes high up and a long round-ended nose that seems o be upside down!
Sally Wakelin - Studies in Creativity 