When I traveled to Cuba for the first time in 2012 I was struck by an uncanny sense of recognition, even though the tropical island bore little visual resemblance to the mostly grim setting of my Russian childhood. My curiosity about the nature of this connection planted a seed for a project that germinated in 2017. Since then, I have returned to Cuba many times, traveling around the country with my view camera. The title of this project comes from the saying “El que nace para tamal del cielo le caen las hojas”, which expresses a deference to destiny deeply endemic to both Cuban and Russian cultures. This fatalism, I came to believe, is bred in large part by having to survive in an inherently unpredictable system. Anchoring myself in the familiarity of that circumstance, I am using my photographs to intuit some of the ways in which Cuban relationship to fate is different from the one I know.