Two Flags, One Havana. From Miami to Havana and Back Again: The Journey Behind Luis Casadevall’s Cuba

Two Photographs, One Story.

There are photographs that describe a place, and others that reveal the emotional territory beneath it. Luis Casadevall’s images of Havana belong firmly to the latter.

In one photograph, a young ballerina moves before a Cuban flag painted across a weathered wall. Her body seems almost weightless against the monumentality of the symbol behind her. In another, made years earlier on the streets of the same city, a young Cuban man leans toward an American flag and kisses it.

Casadevall titled the works The Ballerina and the Flag and Longing for Another Way of Life. Seen separately, each image contains an extraordinary gesture. Placed together, they begin a more complex conversation.

Two flags. Two bodies. Two expressions of identity and desire.

In December 2026, the photographs will meet in Miami when Casadevall’s Havana series is presented at Red Dot Miami during Miami Art Week. Miami, after all, is where the story began.

The City Across the Water

Casadevall did not initially travel to Cuba to produce an artistic project. At the time, he had an apartment in Miami. Havana was close, yet seemed to belong to another world.

There was no commission, no predetermined narrative and no list of images to bring home. He simply went. Then he returned. And returned again.

He wandered through Havana without an agenda, spending time with people and allowing everyday life to lead him. With each return, encounters became relationships and the distance between photographer and subject began to dissolve.

What began as curiosity developed into an archive of more than 65,000 black-and-white photographs. A selection became Aún nos queda el alma—We Still Have the Soul—introduced by Leonardo Padura, published by La Fábrica, and curated by Chema Conesa. Its first edition sold out in less than two months.

Beyond the Familiar Havana

Few cities have been burdened with a visual mythology as persistent as Havana’s: revolutionary iconography, American automobiles, cigars and music, faded façades and the melancholy of a city suspended between historical eras. Casadevall knows these images exist. He simply looks elsewhere. The more time he spent in Havana, the less interested he became in photographing what the city looked like. He wanted to convey what it felt like.

His camera turned toward intimacy, memory, the dignity of an ordinary gesture, humor that survives adversity and the distance between what people possess and what they desire. Children run through a street. Dancers dissolve into movement. A face appears behind a fence. These are fleeting moments, but in Casadevall’s work, the fleeting acquires weight.

We Still Have the Soul allows contradiction to remain unresolved: beauty and deterioration, humor and hardship, attachment and escape, private intimacy and public history.

A Trained Eye, Freed from the Brief

Before Havana, Casadevall spent more than four decades creating images at the highest levels of international advertising and creative direction, earning more than 50 Cannes Lions.

Advertising taught him how completely an image can be controlled: casting, lighting, location, composition, art direction and message.

Havana offered the opposite—no brief, no client, no predetermined message and no second take.

Nothing in these photographs is staged. The discipline lies not in constructing the image, but in recognizing it before it disappears.

A fraction of a second too early, and the relationship has not formed. A fraction too late, and it is gone.

“I photograph what I feel, not what I see.” — Luis Casadevall

Two Flags, Two Desires

The Ballerina and the Flag

A young dancer moves before a Cuban flag painted across a weathered wall. There is no stage, yet body and flag possess the precision of choreography. Fragility meets permanence; individual expression meets collective identity.

Although the image has already found its way into private collections after appearing in Casadevall’s book, its presentation in Miami marks a new moment for the work, bringing it before an international audience during Miami Art Week.

Longing for Another Way of Life

A young Cuban man encounters an American flag. He leans toward it and kisses it. That is all we know, and it is enough. Its power lies between what can be seen and what cannot be known. Placed beside the ballerina, the image describes the possibility of belonging to one place while imagining another.

Why Miami Changes the Images

For generations of Cuban and Cuban American families, the distance between Havana and Miami has never been measured simply in miles: memory, separation, identity, longing and belonging exist on both shores.

The photographs were not created to illustrate that history. Brought together in Miami, however, they inevitably enter into conversation with it.

A ballerina moves beneath one flag.

A young man kisses another.

Between them lies an entire city.

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

Luis Casadevall — We Still Have the Soul
Red Dot Miami 2026 · Miami Art Week

Presented by: Galeria Azur Miami
Booth: 100
Dates: December 2–6, 2026
Location: Mana Wynwood Convention Center
2217 NW 5th Avenue at NW 22nd Street
Miami, FL 33127

VIP & Press Preview
Wednesday, December 2 · 5–6 PM

Opening Night Preview
Wednesday, December 2 · 6–9 PM

Public Show Hours
Thursday, December 3 · 12–8 PM
Friday, December 4 · 12–8 PM
Saturday, December 5 · 12–8 PM
Sunday, December 6 · 12–6 PM

Elsa Casadevall, the artist’s daughter, and Guido Rosales, who leads marketing for the artist, will welcome visitors at Booth 100 and provide a closer introduction to the works, the stories behind them and the available editions.