Photographs by Burt Glinn
Accompanies a traveling exhibition

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To purchase Havana: The Revolutionary Moment, please use the link below.

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Havana: The Revolutionary Moment presents a unique collection of never-before-seen photographs by award-winning Magnum photographer Burt Glinn recording Fidel Castro’s historic entry into Havana in 1959. Interviews and texts by legendary Cuban photographers and others, including Alberto “Korda” Gutierrez, Raul Corrales, Jose Figueroa, Salas, and more, provide an intimate, important perspective of that historical moment.

Hearing the news from Cuba, Burt Glinn left a New York party and hopped a plane to Havana on New Year’s Eve, 1959. Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista had just fled the capital, routed by Fidel’s advancing rebel army. As the first rebel troops entered the city chaos and anticipation of Fidel’s arrival filled the streets. Yet Fidel was still hundreds of miles away. Nobody knew exactly where. Glinn, arriving just after dawn on New Year’s Day, set out to record the transition, find Fidel, and document his triumphant entry into Havana. The photographs he returned with—of Fidel thronged by his countrymen and women as he stopped to encourage them along the road to Havana, of troops embracing, and of fierce men and women alike taking up arms in the streets—capture the revolutionary fervor and idealistic anticipation of the moment.

Forty-two years later Glinn returned to Havana, and gave this piece of Cuban history back to its people. The book and exhibition present an introduction by Cuban Minister of Plastic Arts, Rafael Acosta de Arriba; exclusive excerpts from a private interview between Fidel and Glinn; an essay on the nature of documentation and the photographic image in revolution; as well as interviews and historic images by master Cuban photographers who also photographed the birth of revolutionary Cuba, lending incisive commentary and context to Glinn’s work.

About the Author:

Burt Glinn served in the United States Army between 1943 and 1946 and studied literature at Harvard University, where he edited and photographed for the Harvard Crimson college newspaper. From 1949 to 1950, Glinn worked for LIFE magazine before becoming a freelancer.

Glinn became a member of Magnum in 1951, was president of Magnum between 1972 and 1975, and was re-elected to the post in 1987. Glinn also served as president of the American Society of Media Photographers. He made his mark with spectacular color series’ on the South Seas, Japan, Russia, Mexico and California. In 1959 he received the Mathew Brady Award for Magazine Photographer of the Year from the University of Missouri. His reportages appeared in magazines including Esquire, Geo, Travel + Leisure, Fortune, LIFE and Paris-Match. He covered the Sinai War as well as the U.S. Marine invasion of Lebanon.

A highlight of Glinn’s career came during Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba, immortalized first in a 2004 exhibition that Nan Richardson curated of his work at the Fototeca di Havana, that became a book published in Spanish and Italian as well as English. The exhibition, which was attended by Castro himself and many of Cuba’s artists and photographers, has since traveled around the world.

Versatile and technically brilliant, Glinn has received numerous awards for his editorial and commercial photography, including the Best Book of Photographic Reporting from Abroad from the Overseas Press Club and the Best Print Ad of the Year from the Art Directors Club of New York.

He was not only a prolific and gifted photographer but a man of parts: of style, with his Savile Row suits, canary linen summer kit, his pocket-handkerchiefs and papillons. He was a loquacious and terrific storyteller (not many can match Fidel in chat, but he and Burt went hammer and tongs, language and translators no barrier for 6 hours one night in Havana, trading war stories) with total recall of people, places and detail, and above all, and in our memory of him, a man of great kindness and generosity. He died in April 2008 in New York. Our sincere sympathies to his wife Elena and son Sam.

We will remember him always: the mukluks he gave us from his 1950s Trans Siberian adventure hang high in our office and we smile and think of him every time they sway in the breeze.

Hardcover / $39 USD
8.75″ x 11″ / 128 pages
83 duotone images
August 2005
ISBN: 978-1-8841670-96

Exhibition Information:

Havana: The Revolutionary Moment presents a unique collection of never-before-seen photographs by veteran Magnum photographer Burt Glinn, recording Fidel Castro’s historic entry into Havana. In the introductory memoir, Glinn describes the combination of chutzpah and journalistic prescience that led him to leave a New York party and hop a plane to Havana on New Year’s Eve, 1959. The photographs he returned with—of Fidel thronged by his countrymen and women as he stopped to encourage them along the road to Havana, of troops embracing, and of fierce men and women alike taking up arms in the streets—are full of the revolutionary fervor and idealistic anticipation that characterized that moment in Cuban history. The show opened to acclaim at the Fototeca de Cuba in Havana in January 2001 and will travel to Madrid, London, Paris, Milan, and other venues, before returning to the United States. The domestic tour is organized in association with the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona, Florida.

Download the press release (PDF)

EXHIBITION FACTS
2002-2010 domestic and international tour

Total 93 items to occupy 150 linear feet:
- 29 gelatin-silver prints at 11 x 14″ matted with a 4-ply archival board, framed in black metal under UV Plexi
- 11 gelatin-silver prints at 16 x 20″ matted with a 4-ply archival board, framed in black metal under UV Plexi
- 5 gelatin-silver prints at 20 x 24″ matted with a 4-ply archival board, framed in black metal under UV Plexi
- 3 poetry excerpt panels at 20 x 30″
- 2 bilingual text panels at 20 x 30″
- 44 bilingual (Spanish and English) captions

- 6-8 week bookings
- Fee: $4,500 plus prorated one-way shipping and insurance
- 15 copies of catalog/publication Havana: The Revolutionary Moment included with each booking