Check Out These Photos of Cuba’s Metalheads

It’s been six months since the long-standing American embargo on Cuba ended, but most Americans still know precious little about the country and its culture outside of its use of cars from the ’50s and ’60s and knack for producing top-caliber baseball players.

In December of last year, MetalSucks published an article highlighting thirteen metal bands from the island just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Little did we know that we just scratched the surface of Cuba’s metal scene. Turns out the country has a thriving metal subculture, so much so that NYC-centric general interest news site Gothamist sent a reporter and a photographer to cover it.

Todd Seelie’s photographs of tattooed Cubans wearing metal gear are fantastic. Writer Lauren Evans name-checks Maxim Rock, a government-sponsored metal club in Havana, but it’s not clear whether Seelie’s subjects are attendees of a show at the club or weather metal fashion is just generally popular with the public in Cuba. Either way it’s a must-look, and a friendly reminder that all us metalheads are basically the same the entire fucking world over, even in places that have been isolated from America’s (and to a lesser extent, the world’s) cultural grasp for a very long time. Check out the gallery here, with a few samples posted below.