Cuba before Castro? UAH student finds vintage photos of 'Havana at its best'

al.com (blog)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - It started last April when Emily Pate made one of her routine shopping trips to Packards Antiques on South Memorial Parkway.

It culminated when Jose Betancourt, Pate's photography professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, laid eyes on the pictures.

"You have Cuba -- before Castro," Betancourt, a native of Cuba, recalled saying. "So yeah, I was excited. It was great."

Imagine you're Pate. She merely thought she was buying a couple of bags of old film canisters - fascinated in a digital age with film photography.

"I kind of was interested in old cameras and in one of the booths, there were two bags of these little film canisters," said Pate, a Huntsville native who will be graduating in May with a degree in marketing. "I've never seen that in person before."

In those dozens of canisters, however, Pate found a handful of film rolls. And in those canisters with film, a couple had a small piece of paper that simply said "Cuba."

"I didn't know for sure where it was until I brought it to school to show Jose," she said.

Betancourt knew immediately he was looking at a window through time of his homeland. The pictures apparently were taken in the mid-1950s by a couple on vacation in Cuba, based on other photos found in the canisters as well as the cars in the Cuba photos.

But filling in the details is nothing more than guesswork.

"She's like my little investigator," Betancourt said. "She loves figuring all this out."

Said Pate, "It's mysterious but it's definitely piqued by curiosity."

Of course, Cuba has been a sort of mystery since its borders were closed when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and brought communism to America's doorstep.

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