Spoonful of Sugar

Sugar was the first item of interest for Hangzhou-born photographer Zhu Yinghao when he visited Cuba. As a boy in the 1970s, Zhu recalls going to the ration shop with his family's supplies booklet to collect sugar. The man running the shop asked him if he knew where the small Zhejiang village, and the country as a whole, received its sugar. Glimmering like diamonds, the precious commodity was distributed by the half kilo per household, imported from what seemed like a faraway land. But decades later, the notion of a corresponding closeness between the two countries for Zhu would rise from the realms of early memory.

A state-run bakery is emptied of patrons after the morning’s supply of bread is distributed

Zhu made a trip to Cuba after completing a shoot in Mexico in 2013, beginning a photography series which would later come to document his own ruptured sense of nostalgia. In Havana, he stepped into a grocery store and a shopkeeper pointed to a sack of sugar, telling him the gunny bag was made in China. Originating from similar political and economic structures, the two state-dominated systems led to very different outcomes. For both, the Communist Party remains in power but unprecedented economic vitality in China, and, Cuba's predicament of isolation has created landscapes of stark dualities.