Hotel Inglaterra was built in 1875 and nationalised in 1959 by Fidel Castro shortly after the victory of the Cuban Revolution. It remains Nationalised to this day. In its time it has housed all corners of society.

Sitting on the terrace of Hotel Inglaterra you can feel the wet, high frequency, air pulsating around you. This air, that is so specific to the region, is guilty of hurricanes and destruction but is also the culprit behind laying the scene for the type of muggy night when the double bassist on the table next to you, who for a while looked like another paying customer, leans his mahogany instrument against his shoulder and plays with such a fever that it reverberates off
the hotel’s cool stone walls and out into the humid night and you glimpse a lonely cowboy walking through Parque Central with only the long shadows of palm trees that fall across his path for company. This is what Sophie Wedgwood conjures in her photo series, Hotel Inglaterra. Told through the stubs of H Upmans on coffee tables and the lovelorn faces of Cuban locals that frequent the hotel who seem to know love and suffering and the real poetry of life all at the same time. All the while bow tied waiters serve tables with a tired ease that you only see close to the equator, under the red sun. Wedgwood’s lens turns to the doorman standing out front in a double breasted suit and hat, who, bent over from the heat, raises his eyebrows and gestures to an unseen figure, as if to say ‘What can I do about it?’ A taxi driver rolls past in a 1950s Ford Victoria and looks over his shoulder, the sunlight on his face. The black silhouette of a woman’s face in a taxi veers forward and you wonder how quick Wedgwood must be to be able to capture such a fleeing moment. Traffic spills across one of Old Havana’s rambling, beeping, whistling, amigo-calling, trumpet-playing streets and a woman holding an umbrella blurs across the road as if smudged by the rain. The light wanes and Wedgwood casts her lens to a churro stand down what road you don’t know, but the street light falls on the young vendor's face with such a tender warmth that your heart aches for him, frozen, in that moment in time.

Havana’s nights, which through Wedgwood’s rain splattered film images, have all the shine and scratches and dirt of a real city, as she photographs the neon shimmer in the reflection of taxis’ spray, and perhaps most poignantly of all, Hotel Inglaterra’s sign, half lit, illuminated in the darkness -as if calling out to you, me and any other lonely wandering soul, like a church spire on a weather beaten hill. And her closing image, the once still palm trees of Parque Central
that now sway in the dark with a wildness that reminds you you’re in the middle of the ocean, straddled between two achingly vast and different America’s, that, like long lost siblings, stare across the precipice at one another. And there you are, in the middle of them both, on a small, but by no means inconsequential island, whose half-lit lights still blink out into the darkness (and are still quietly watched on either side). 

Words Rebecca Wedgwood