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Entitled simply "A Town", COLORS 16 was produced entirely on location in Baracoa, a small town in eastern Cuba. The result is 108 pages of exclusive photography and illuminating text about a town in the middle of nowhere. "COLORS has never been especially interested in who Princess Di exercised with last week", said the editor at the time, Alex Marashian. "This issue was our chance to reverse the usual flow of information - to give a micro-culture control of the media. We wanted to treat Baracoa as if it were the center of the universe". The COLORS travelling staff - five journalists and four photographers, including Oliviero Toscani - had lots of reasons for visiting Baracoa. For one thing, it's where Cuba's first tourist, Christopher Columbus, originally landed. Today, 36 years after Cuba closed its doors to outsiders, the tourist industry in Cuba is about to boom again, and Baracoa is a prime target. There's always something to be learned from a species or culture that's about to become extinct. In fact, COLORS claims to have found a civilization that's actually living in the future. Using all of the favorite subjects of magazines - celebrities, fashion, architecture and design, even cooking - and all the usual techniques of COLORS - big pictures, exhaustive research and a Martian-like sensibility - the latest issue unravels the daily life of this town of 4,000. In a story on Local Celebrities, for example, COLORS tracks down and interviews the best-known characters of Baracoa. They include the local Hula-hoop champion, the fastest coconut-tree climber (up and down a 60m trunk in three minutes - at the age of 72!), a man who eats glass for fun (he devoured a whole fluorescent lighting tube for the COLORS staff) and a champion fighting cock (he's killed five rivals and maimed six others). Numerous stories in the magazine show how Baracoa is coping now with problems the rest of the world will soon be facing - from fuel shortages to food shortages. A humorous story about household appliances presents a dozen local inventions - including a homemade hair dryer - made from recycled parts, and the fashion story proves that all you need for a great pair of motorcycle boots are some strips of vinyl car interior. While the rest of the world talks about recycling, COLORS shows how the Baracoans have turned it into such an art that almost nothing ends up in the garbage. If Baracoa does represent the future somehow, then the future doesn't look so bad. |