Hot new trend in Cuban ID photos - digital suits and blouses

Hot new trend in Cuban ID photos: digital suits and blouses

It wasn't yet 10 a.m. but Juan Carlos Espinosa was sweating when he
exited his Soviet-era Lada sedan in front of a photo studio in the
middle-class Havana neighborhood of 10 de Octubre.
BY MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press

HAVANA
It wasn't yet 10 a.m. but Juan Carlos Espinosa was sweating when he
exited his Soviet-era Lada sedan in front of a photo studio in the
middle-class Havana neighborhood of 10 de Octubre.

With temperatures in the 80s and humidity lying thick over the city,
Espinosa wore a black T-shirt as he posed for a visa photo in front of a
white sheet. Then, in a side room, Lian Marrero worked magic: digitally
cutting away the T-shirt with a photo-editing program and pasting in a
somber black suit with a neatly knotted gray tie.

Marrero hit print and Espinosa had a set of three professional-looking
ID photos of himself in a suit that once belonged to a total stranger,
or may have never existed at all.

Across Cuba and the world, tens of thousands of Cubans stare out of ID
photos in elegant suits and dressy blouses they have never actually
worn. Each imperceptibly altered photo is a tiny tribute to Cubans'
finely honed ability to apply ingeniously homebrewed technical solutions
to the problems of an island beset by economic scarcity.

In this case the problem is relatively minor: how to look one's best in
official photos when tropical heat, lack of air conditioning and tight
family budgets make it highly impractical to wear dressy clothes to the
local photo studio. The answer: over-the-counter photo-editing programs
and an informal sharing network of photo studio owners who trade images
of suits and blouses among themselves.

Marrero, a 27-year-old electrician who runs a busy photo studio in the
front room of the home he shares with his wife, said they had offered
clients actual clothing to try on but people found it unappealing to
wear clothes that others had been sweating in.

"We realized that people preferred the idea of digital suits," he said.
"We ended up with three real suits and 10 digital ones," and eventually
the shop got rid of the real clothes entirely.

The demand for altered photos has diminished as more Cuban and foreign
government agencies equip themselves with the ability to take in-house
digital photos. But many foreign consulates still require visa
applicants to bring their own headshots, and since few explicitly
prohibit altering photos, the digital suit business is still flourishing.

Espinosa, a 53-year-old mechanic, said he and his wife, Isis Lopez, had
debated between a blue digital suit with a patterned tie and the
black-and-gray combo they eventually settled on.

"Wearing a suit in Cuba isn't easy," he said. "Here, we have the ability
to pick whichever one we want."

Both ended up happy with the result.

"I thought this one was more serious. I like the solid-color tie," Lopez
said. "Yes, I like this combination."

Source: Hot new trend in Cuban ID photos: digital suits and blouses | In
Cuba Today - http://www.incubatoday.com/news/article80241122.html