How We Got Those Cuba Pictures Andrew Moore's photographs of Cuba are the perfect visual companion to this week's cover story by John Jeremiah Sullivan, who takes the pulse of the country today and considers what it might be like tomorrow. We wish we could take credit for generating the pictures, but in fact we stumbled upon them. Originally, we hoped to send a photographer to Cuba and applied for a journalist visa. But in early August, following a months-long wait, the Cuban government turned us down: our request was "too general." We had asked permission to take portraits of Cubans from all walks of life. Sullivan was able to visit the country with his wife, who is Cuban-American. After an unsuccessful search for photographers who were headed to Cuba on their own, or who had been there not too long ago, we discovered that Moore had a book coming out in October called . . . Cuba. It turned out that Moore, a regular contributor - he shot New Orleans for a March issue of the magazine - had been traveling to the country since 1998 and been there as recently as January. When we saw his unpublished images, we could not believe our good fortune. The picture of the Bacunayagua Bridge, for example, seemed to have been shot expressly to be the cover it would become. In the print edition of the magazine, we featured mostly landscapes and city scenes, but you can see some of Moore's portraits in a slideshow here. What follows is a condensed version of a conversation we had recently about his Cuban experiences. What took you to Cuba for the first time in 1998? I had been photographing Times Square before all the changes brought by its redevelopment and the renovation of all the theaters. I had heard that Cuba had incredible theaters, and so that was partly the spur to go down there. Once I arrived, I realized that there was much more to Havana than theaters. There was so much history and so many incredibly old and poignant buildings that it didn't make sense just to do theaters. I really wanted to explore many aspects of the life of Havana, especially all of the different architectural styles represented in the city. What keeps drawing you back? I have to say that I think this new book is sort of the conclusion to my travels there. The country has this dual quality, especially for somebody from the U.S., in that it is both exotic and familiar at the same time. Cuba was the intersection for influences from Europe, from the United States and from Latin America, and out of that came an alchemy - it produced its own unique, vibrant culture. So when you get down there, there's a kind of uncanny feeling to see things that are both very familiar and yet kind of strangely out of context. For instance, in the central park in downtown Havana there's a large bust of Abraham Lincoln, and the Capitolio, which is the main capitol building in Havana, itself is based on the U.S. Capitol building. A lot of the modernist architecture there - architecture from the '40s and '50s - is very reminiscent of, let's say not only Bauhaus, but actually West Coast L.A. architecture. Then there are more obvious things like the cars, refrigerators, elevators, washing machines and all these things that were very common in the U.S. in the '50s and are still in use down there. How would you get into Cuba? In the late '90s, when I first started going to Cuba, part of Clinton's indirect approach to Cuba was to encourage a people-to-people diplomacy, so I was able to obtain a license and travel there legally. With the election of George Bush, things began to change just a little bit, and after 9/11 it all really shut down, and there was really very little possibility to travel legally to Cuba between 2002 and 2008. After the election of Barack Obama, the situation began to loosen up a little bit. On my most recent trip I was actually able to obtain a license again from the Treasury Department. So how did you get into Cuba between 2002 and 2009? I had to find other means to get there. Is this your first book on Cuba? No, this is a revisiting of the Cuba work for me. I originally published a book in 2002 called "Inside Havana." That was actually my first book, and although I liked the selection, I had a lot of issues with the layout of the book and some of the reproductions and the editing. I always felt that it was not quite the book I wanted to make on Cuba. So two years ago, when I published the book on Detroit, "Detroit Disassembled," I worked with this wonderful publisher in Italy named Andrea Damiani. We talked about doing a limited edition of the Cuba book with a redesign and all new format and new pictures. So 10 years later, basically, I have a new book, called simply "Cuba." It represents work from 1998 through 2012. There are 72 images in this new book, about half are from the old book and the other half are new pictures since 2002. The first book was really focused on Havana and on interiors and the unique worlds of these homes that I was able to get into. The new book takes that as a nucleus and then expands to more of a sweeping overview of the island itself, showing scenes of nature, small towns, portraits, details and other things to give a much broader view of the texture and quality of island itself. It's meant to be a portrait of Cuba? Yes it is. Actually my view, speaking as a North American - really as an outsider - is that this is a portrait of the end days, for better or worse, of this monolithic, ossified system that they have. Changes are coming probably sooner rather than later to Cuba in all kinds of ways, and this is my portrait of the end times of this very self-contained world that Cuba has become over the past 50 years. Although change comes slowly to Cuba - it may take another 20 years before relationships with the U.S. change and Cubans will freely be able to use the Internet and have broader contact with the outside world.