Magic-Hour_cover_portrait.jpg
Magic-Hour_cover_portrait.jpg

The Magic Hour | Lorenzo DeStefano

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The Magic Hour/La Hora Mágica: A Photographer’s Journeys Through Cuba

Publication date: 23rd July 2026

In the early 1990s, during Cuba’s severe economic crisis known as the ‘Special Period’, photographer Lorenzo DeStefano set out on a seven-day journey across the island in a battered 1952 Willys Jeep. Travelling with his friend and driver Juan de Mata Montero Reyes, he documented a country in crisis – and the everyday resilience of the people he encountered. Featuring 123 striking black-and-white photographs, this bilingual English and Spanish edition chronicles DeStefano’s rugged, breakdown-plagued trip – from remote villagers to urban dwellers, Santería priests to underage prostitutes. The text and photographs illuminate this complex place and its resilient people.

Lorenzo’s friendship with Juan de Mata is at the centre of this book. Covering a variety of subjects including cars, women, politics and human rights, their road trip cements a deep, cross-cultural friendship between two men of different generations. Expanding beyond the personal to a true panoramic of contemporary Cuban life, keeping one eye on the viewfinder and the other on the reality he is photographing, he powerfully conveys his impressions, his bewilderment, and his anxiety as an American traveling under the radar of official government permission.

Hardback (ISBN 9781914278907)

eBook (ISBN 9781914278914)

“Lorenzo DeStefano has created a beautifully curated memoir of his travels crisscrossing Cuba in the 1990s. Told in arresting photographs, it is near impossible to turn away. The Magic Hour is a worthy addition to the histories of Cuba, most especially the grim days during the so-called Special Period, an Orwellian euphemism for years of steep austerity and privation.” (Ann Louis Bardach, author of Without Fidel and Cuba Confidential)

“Remarkable photographs that chronicle times Cubans hoped would never return, and in 2016 many thought never would.” (Dr Stephen Wilkinson, International Institute for the Study of Cuba)

https://keyt.com/lifestyle/travel/2026/03/15/the-magic-hour-puts-cuba-in-focus/

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Format:

The Magic Hour/La Hora Mágica: A Photographer’s Journeys Through Cuba

Publication date: 23rd July 2026

In the early 1990s, during Cuba’s severe economic crisis known as the ‘Special Period’, photographer Lorenzo DeStefano set out on a seven-day journey across the island in a battered 1952 Willys Jeep. Travelling with his friend and driver Juan de Mata Montero Reyes, he documented a country in crisis – and the everyday resilience of the people he encountered. Featuring 123 striking black-and-white photographs, this bilingual English and Spanish edition chronicles DeStefano’s rugged, breakdown-plagued trip – from remote villagers to urban dwellers, Santería priests to underage prostitutes. The text and photographs illuminate this complex place and its resilient people.

Lorenzo’s friendship with Juan de Mata is at the centre of this book. Covering a variety of subjects including cars, women, politics and human rights, their road trip cements a deep, cross-cultural friendship between two men of different generations. Expanding beyond the personal to a true panoramic of contemporary Cuban life, keeping one eye on the viewfinder and the other on the reality he is photographing, he powerfully conveys his impressions, his bewilderment, and his anxiety as an American traveling under the radar of official government permission.

Hardback (ISBN 9781914278907)

eBook (ISBN 9781914278914)

“Lorenzo DeStefano has created a beautifully curated memoir of his travels crisscrossing Cuba in the 1990s. Told in arresting photographs, it is near impossible to turn away. The Magic Hour is a worthy addition to the histories of Cuba, most especially the grim days during the so-called Special Period, an Orwellian euphemism for years of steep austerity and privation.” (Ann Louis Bardach, author of Without Fidel and Cuba Confidential)

“Remarkable photographs that chronicle times Cubans hoped would never return, and in 2016 many thought never would.” (Dr Stephen Wilkinson, International Institute for the Study of Cuba)

https://keyt.com/lifestyle/travel/2026/03/15/the-magic-hour-puts-cuba-in-focus/

‍ ‍

“As a photographer I am after that fragment of time when people’s gaze meets mine, when the lens reveals life beneath the exterior. As someone born and raised in Hawai’i, almost 5,000 miles away from ‘this other island’, I felt an immediate affinity with Cubans and with their native landscape.  Moving beyond divisive ideologies and the limitations of language, my focus was the world of everyday citizens. More than thirty years ago, these journeys marked my reawakening as a photographer after having redirected my energies more to writing, theater and filmmaking, disciplines that I remain very engaged in today.” (Lorenzo DeStefano)

“For many of us on the outside, it remains difficult to penetrate beneath the cultural stereotypes and crosstalk that we receive about Cuba. THE MAGIC HOUR is an attempt to bridge the gap between what we see and what we think we know about this unique island nation ninety miles from the southeastern shore of the United States. Reports of how troubling things are in Cuba during this precarious time, as well as first person information I am getting from my many friends there, testify to yet another ominous “special period” in the country’s long and tumultuous history.” (Lorenzo DeStefano)