Jean-Christophe Béchet’s Habana Song begins with two encounters with Cuba separated by decades. He first traveled there in 1990, when the “Balseros” were attempting to reach Florida on improvised rafts. On a later return to Havana, around the death of Fidel Castro, he found a city visibly changing: American cars had become tourist taxis, buildings along the Malecón were under renovation, and luxury bars were appearing. The book is therefore not a report from a single moment, but a study shaped by historical distance and return.

Béchet turns away from this increasingly polished tourist stage. He wanders instead through darker streets, attending to a Havana suspended between poverty and elegance, order and anarchy. These tensions are not resolved into a simple account of decline or transformation. They remain active within the photographs, giving the city a character that is social and atmospheric rather than merely picturesque.

Black and white is central to the project. In place of the saturated color commonly associated with photographic representations of Cuba, Béchet constructs a quieter visual register of shadow, surface, gesture, and movement. The musical suggestion of the title describes the book’s method: individual pictures function less as isolated declarations than as recurring notes within an extended photographic passage through the city.

Published by Loco in 2020, this French-language clothbound hardcover comprises 152 pages and approximately one hundred duotone reproductions. Its significance for a serious photobook collection rests on the conjunction of two historical encounters, a consciously anti-touristic viewpoint, and a sustained monochrome treatment. Habana Song preserves neither an idealized Havana nor a comprehensive documentary inventory; it offers a more subjective record of looking, leaving the city’s contradictions audible within the rhythm of the book.