In the older homes of Havana, daylight enters through colored glass — through fan-shaped transom windows and lunettes that paint the interiors with shifting light from morning to dusk. The effect is unlike anything else in the Americas. It is quintessentially Cuban, and almost entirely unknown to the outside world.

Cuba: Through the Looking Glass traces the history of a nation through one of its most intimate and overlooked art forms: the stained glass windows that have quietly witnessed everything Cuba has lived through, from the colonial period and the wars of independence, through the age of the sugar barons and the republican era, to the revolution of 1959 and its long aftermath.

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Our on-screen curator is Mirell Vázquez, a restorer and scholar working at the Escuela Taller in Havana, who has spent years documenting and preserving what turns out to be an extraordinary concentration of historic stained glass — roughly five hundred works in the Vedado neighborhood alone. Some were produced by Cuban Creole artisans who developed their own distinctive tradition, substituting wooden frames for the lead structures common in northern Europe. Others were imported from workshops in Spain, France, and Italy. And a handful — unexpected, improbable, and true — came from Tiffany Studios in New York. ​​Yes. Louis Comfort Tiffany in Havana.

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​That discovery, which first surfaced in an earlier project exploring the unknown migrations of Tiffany's work, became the thread that led here — to a far larger story about Cuban cultural identity, about the layered histories embedded in architecture, and about what survives when so much else does not.

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The film unfolds as a road journey across the island, each window a point of entry into a broader historical moment. The stained glass of Havana is not decoration. It is a technology of light — and through it, Cuba looks different.

Two painters frame the film's visual language. Amelia Peláez, one of the great figures of modern Cuban art, drew directly from colonial interiors, iron grilles, and the luminous geometry of stained glass. Humberto Calzada, whose work Eduardo Montes-Bradley has previously documented on film, meditates on the same filtered light — balconies, corridors, the quiet architecture of memory. Their paintings are not illustrations of this story. They are proof that this story matters.

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This documentary is also, at its core, a collaboration born of improbable circumstances. Mirell Vázquez and Eduardo Montes-Bradley have never met in person. She lives in Havana; he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Their work together has unfolded entirely through WhatsApp calls and emails, interrupted by power outages, by illness, by the recurring difficulties of life on the island today. A flight was booked. A mosquito-borne epidemic forced its cancellation. They continue to plan. What draws the filmmaker to this project is not only the beauty of the glass but something more fragile — the survival of knowledge itself, passed from master to apprentice across generations, in a city where so much has been interrupted.

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At the Presidential Palace, and in several mansions of Havana, windows came from an unlikely source — Tiffany Studios in New York. 

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Cuba: Through the Looking Glass is being developed with Carolina Calzada as Executive Producer, in collaboration with the University of Miami's Cuban Heritage Collection and Florida International University's Casa Cuba — two of the most significant Cuban research institutions in the United States. The film is supported by the Documentary Film Fund, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

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Glass refracts light. History refracts memory. Through the stained glass of Havana's houses and public buildings, one begins to glimpse both.​

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