At age 10, Frank Gonzalez broke into an abandoned building, took a piece of roofing insulation, overlaid it with loose fiberglass strands, and sealed it with boat resin, making his first surfboard. Ingenious, resourceful, and of dubious legality, this was typical for a budding Cuban surfer, though a more popular method of board building even today is to find a broken refrigerator and strip the foam out of its walls. Shaping the foam is done with a cheese grater, torn pages from a foreign surf magazine serving as inspiration for the board’s profile. There are no surf shops, no places to buy boards, and Cubans are dependent on travelers leaving boards behind when they go home. Among Cuba’s hundred or so active surfers, only half own a modern stick.
In 2016, a group of lifelong friends working under the name Makewild traveled to Cuba to create a surf film. For Marco Bava, Seth Brown, Tyler Dunham, and Corey McLean, the trip, from which these
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