Havana's historic waterfront now hosts 'Con los pies en la tierra,' a free exhibition of 21 award-winning photo stories, documenting the climate crisis that continues to devastate communities worldwide while capital accumulation proceeds unchecked. The open-air installation, titled 'Down to Earth,' opened on Wednesday, August 12, 2026, on the esplanade of the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta. It offers no-cost access to images depicting the systemic environmental destruction impacting the global working class.
The exhibition, curated by the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam, runs through Monday, September 7, 2026. Its outdoor placement on a public promenade ensures constant accessibility, requiring neither tickets nor bookings. Photographers like Lalo de Almeida, Ami Vitale, and Kadir van Lohuizen contribute projects covering wildfires, floods, disappearing ice, and drought. These images capture the brutal realities faced by communities forced to adapt to environmental collapse, a direct consequence of industrial capital's relentless pursuit of profit. The projects specifically detail the ways communities are adapting, demonstrating human resilience in the face of a crisis not of their making.
State-Sponsored Spectacle
Local organization for the display comes from Fototeca de Cuba, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Cuba, and the Office of the City Historian. The EU Delegation in Cuba provides additional support. These state and inter-state entities facilitate a cultural event that raises awareness of climate change, yet their backing doesn't extend to challenging the underlying economic structures that fuel the crisis. The exhibition serves as a symbolic gesture, funded by powers deeply invested in the very system causing the devastation. It presents the consequences of ecological breakdown without confronting the imperial interests that perpetuate it.
The images themselves highlight the burden placed on the dispossessed. They show how communities are adapting to conditions like extreme weather and resource scarcity, from the melting glaciers to parched farmlands. These adaptations are often survival strategies, not solutions, forced upon those least responsible for the planet's degradation. The exhibition's focus on adaptation, while visually compelling, sidesteps the urgent need for systemic change to halt the forces of capital that drive climate catastrophe. It offers a visual catalog of suffering, but no pathway to dismantle the mechanisms of surplus extraction that create it.
Local Realities Amidst Global Crisis
The exhibition site, at the mouth of Havana harbor where the Prado promenade meets the Malecon, is easily accessible to local residents and visitors alike. This public space, well-used by families and couples into the evening, provides a backdrop to the stark economic realities faced by Havana's workers. Apartment rents in the city range from US$300 to US$800 a month. Such figures underscore the daily struggle for survival for many, even as international bodies sponsor cultural displays about global crises. The cost of living remains a pressing concern for the working class, a reality often obscured by such public spectacles.
While visitors are advised to wear hats, sunscreen, and carry water, the deeper structural issues remain unaddressed. The Malecon becomes a gathering place at sunset, a temporary respite from the pressures of daily life. The exhibition, for all its visual power, ultimately functions as a managed presentation of a crisis, rather than a catalyst for dismantling the capitalist mechanisms that produce it. It allows for contemplation of symptoms without confronting the disease, a common tactic to manage dissent without altering the fundamental distribution of power and wealth.