Tales of Dreams, Uncertainty, and Survival in Havana: Despite isolation and disrepair, Cuba's largest housing project remains a place of vibrant cultural expression where residents forge their own belonging.

At the same time, the scarcity of building materials and authorities' misguided allocation of resources have made it impossible to maintain Alamar's relatively new housing complexes, built in the 1970s and 1980s. Concurrent with the construction of Alamar's housing projects, a chef-d'oeuvre of Cuban cinematography, the 1974 I De cierta manera i (One Way or Another), was being shot by Sara Gómez, a Black filmmaker who was the first female director in the Cuban film industry. With 100 housing blocks spanning about 15 square kilometers (six square miles) in the municipality of Habana del Este and a population of 100,000, Alamar is the nation's largest housing project. [Extracted from the article]