Manzanillo, Cuba, 1925 – Havana, 1991

Born into a peasant family and without academic training, Gilberto Ante came to photography through an extreme decision: in 1950 he amputated two of his fingers at a sugar mill to collect the compensation that bought his first camera, a Ciroflex. After 1959 he photographed for the Presidential Palace press office, co-founded the magazine Verde Olivo with Ernesto Guevara, and worked for more than twenty-five years for Bohemia. He covered the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the literacy campaign.

His archive holds 27,549 images taken between 1960 and 1990, now preserved and studied in Bogotá by La Central. Beyond the official story, it keeps another Cuba: women at home, farmers, workers, life in the side streets of the Revolution. The negatives were made with leftover film stock and improvised chemicals, scratched and damaged, carrying the material trace of the conditions in which each image was made. The archive is organized in four themes: Revolutionary Sunday, Icons, Femininity Under Pressure and Labor Force.

Credits: Gilberto Ante Archive, La Central, Bogotá.