Stories of salsa dancing and hot Cuban summers warmed up a frozen Rapid City audience this weekend. The owners of Images of the World presented a slideshow of their latest adventure and educated a crowd on Cuban culture.
Nearly 130 people fill a room in Rapid City’s Journey Museum as Bruce Junek introduces the Cuba Libre slide show.
Junek and Tass Thacker have traveled the world together since 1979. They create photo and video slide shows on different cultures and present them to schools and organizations across the country.
The couple who are in their 60’s have primarily traveled by bicycle. But Thacker was diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2015. The two decided to leave the bikes and take a trip to Cuba after her recovery.
“We wanted to have a focus so we thought ‘well, we’ll just learn to salsa dance’. That was a really great way to visit the country because a lot of the instructors weren’t really at a studio per se-they can’t afford it. They’d just teach us in their living rooms. It was a really great way to meet a lot of different people through the dancing,” says Thacker.
Many of the photos and stories in the slideshow highlight poverty in Cuba.
“The people there were much poorer than we would have ever guessed. And the effects of the revolution—that they’ve been cut off, for so long—the country has just fallen. Just until a couple months ago the average person’s wage was 14 dollars a month. So when you’re making 14 dollars a month, you’re not able to fix up your home, the roads can’t get fixed, you can’t even really afford clothes. You can barely afford food,” Thacker says.
The couple visited the country for 6 weeks in the summer of 2016, shortly before the death of Fidel Castro.
“Libre actually means free and Cuba Libre was kind of a slogan for the early part of the revolution. And we took that because the revolution really didn’t bring freedom for the Cuban people. The revolution really brought suppression. And so we wanted to take a slogan that they used long ago and kind of turn it around and say ‘well, Cuba really needs to be free now’,” says Junek.
The two say Castro’s death changed the meaning of their slideshow since it’s now likely Cubans will gain more freedom. Additional presentations are being planned for later this year.
Visit www.imagesoftheworld.com for more information.