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his standards.
    Seven days a week I ran around New York with a pager and a cell phone and waited for the photo desk to call with an assignment. In my downtime I worked at Craig Taylor, a high-end shirt company, running errands and stuffing envelopes. I had barely $75 in the bank on a good week, scraped by for rent, and scrounged to pay the bills for the phone and pager—my two most crucial possessions, aside from my cameras. Photography required thousands of dollars in initial investment to amass the proper equipment: two professional camera bodies, then $1,500 each (it was predigital); fast professional lenses with an aperture of 2.8, which ran from $300 to $2,500; a long zoom lens, about $2,000; a flash, $200; and a Domke camera bag, $100. I needed about $10,000 in total. I spent days walking around B&H and Adorama camera stores, dreaming of the gear I would purchase one day when I had money.
    Sometime around my twenty-fifth birthday, the last of my three sisters got married, and I had an epiphany. My father and Bruce had given each of my sisters $15,000 to spend toward their wedding costs. Miguel and I had broken up when we moved back to New York, and I knew I would never get married in my twenties; in fact, I wasn’t sure I would ever love anything as much as photography. So I made my father and Bruce a proposition: “If you advance me my wedding money now, I can use it to invest in my career, and I will one day have enough money to fund my own wedding.” They agreed. I bought new cameras and lenses and put the rest of the money in the bank.
     • • • 
    A FTER LESS THAN A YEAR back in New York, I was desperate to travel and looked to Latin America once again. One country intrigued me most, perhaps because it was off-limits: Cuba. In 1997, Communist Cuba was embargoed, and Americans rarely visited. Being a foreign journalist in Cuba was also risky; the government monitored foreigners they suspected would publish negative stories about the ailing Communist system. I didn’t know anyone who had been there; at the time I didn’t know one foreign correspondent and knew few other journalists. But I was bursting with curiosity and the daring of youth. I was fascinated by the steady rise of capitalism in such a steadfastly Communist country.

    Cuban couple watching Fidel Castro on TV at home, 1997. 
    I landed in Havana in May. As I rode the minivan from the airport into the city, I looked down at my nervous hands holding a sheet of paper with fading blue lines and the address of my destination and realized I was very alone. I read the address to the bus driver in rusty Argentine Spanish and felt an instant attachment to him. I wanted to spend the rest of my trip on the bus. Through the window I saw that Havana was decrepit. Some buildings had paint peeling away from their facades; others were just a heap of exposed, rotting wood. Rooftops had lost shingles; clothes were hanging up to dry in the pouring rain; boys nonchalantly rode their bikes through twelve-inch puddles. When I got out at my stop, two women and a man looked at me as if I carried a banner that said AMERICAN CAPITALISM . I was a stranger: My shoes were too new and well made for me to be Cuban. Even my hair clip would cost a month’s wages there.
    In a travel book I had found an agency that arranged home stays, and they placed me with a woman named Leo, whom I paid $22 a night for a small room. She greeted me as if I were an old friend. On my dresser she left two tiny bars of soap stolen from an American hotel in the mid-1970s. She left chocolates next to the soap. They were stolen from the same hotel.
    Three rocking chairs awaited on the glassed-in terrace with a ninth-story view, and Leo and her mother, Graciela, took their places and motioned me to sit. We began exchanging the usual questions, small talk, one-word inferences, and waited for intonations that quickly became familiar. We rocked in our chairs, and everything I had read about the