A little background about Osvaldo (who died in 1992 at 78) and Roberto

Osvaldo came to the U.S. with his parents in 1928; he was 14. They settled in the Bronx, but Osvaldo traveled back and forth to Cuba several times, and on one of these trips met and married Elsa, whom he married in 1939. Roberto was born in November, 1940. He went to work as a mechanic and then learned spot welding which he worked at throughout World War II. At the same time, he joined a photography club at the plant where he worked.

By the end of the war, Osvaldo was in love with photography: he won his first photo prize in 1947, with his photograph of Chinatown that opens this exhibition. He decided to try and open his own studio and found a space on 50th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues; he opened the studio in 1948 or 49, and proceeded to do everything that fledgling studios do -- birthday parties, passport photos, copying of documents. Osvaldo started to get odd jobs with Madison Square Garden and started doing work for the international boxing club which controlled all of the major boxing arenas and had contracts with all of the champions at the time. Osvaldo and his son went to all of the boxing events at the St. Nicholas Arena and Madison Square Garden.

When he was 15, Roberto quit school to help his dad in the studio. His father was freelancing for the Cuban weekly magazine, Bohemia, and one day received an assignment to photograph a young man named Fidel Castro who was in New York in 1955 to raise money for the 26th of July Movement, specifically for the planned expedition of the yacht Granma from Mexico to Cuba. Fidel visited the studio two or three times, and that's when the photo was taken of Fidel walking through Central Park.

In August, 1957, Roberto recounts the following:

"We put the 26th of July flag on the Statue of Liberty, as a publicity stunt, because things were happening in Cuba, Fidel was in the mountains, but since the [Herbert] Mathews interview in January, there was very little in the press, so we did that as a stunt so that people would know something was happening in Cuba. Six of us took the flag and climbed up the Statue and placed the flag. I came down, took all the photographs, then we went up to take down the flag. It was the only one we had. No one bothered us, and we had come prepared with blank rolls of film just in case. Anyway, I developed the rolls of film and gave strips of film to all of the newspapers and the wire services. It was midweek in August, dead in terms of news, so it made the front page in three or four papers, and inside the New York Times, front page on the Herald Tribune and wire services sent it all over the country. It was even published in Life magazine. I was 16 and in retrospect, from a historical point of view, that might be the most important image made outside of Cuba in the whole struggle against Batista, and it worked out great -- four or five months later the Puerto Rican nationalists tried to the same thing, but mesh had been put over the windows and they were never opened again."

When the Revolution came to power, Roberto immediately hitched a ride on a Cubana plane that had been captured by the 26th of July Movement, a plane stolen by Batistianos from Cuba, and now was going to be returned to Cuba. The plane left Idlewild with about 35 Cubans. When Roberto saw Fidel, who arrived in Havana six days later, Fidel asked for his father, saying "Tell him to come back, we need him."

Since Osvaldo was always saying he hoped to return to Cuba, the decision to leave New York was easy. He returned immediately (leaving his wife and Roberto's younger sister to close up their home and pack; they returned the end of 1960), and both father and son immediately started photographing the revolution-in-the-making.