Patricia Ellen Gillespie and Alvaro Pérez Abrahantes agree their first meeting was strictly business. It was March 2019, and both were professors at New York University’s documentary program in Havana, Cuba.
“It wasn’t like we locked eyes and got hit by electricity, like people tell you it should be,” Ms. Gillespie said of the moment in Mr. Pérez Abrahantes’s office. “He was a nice guy.”
That zap came later, when Mr. Pérez Abrahantes shared his interest in making a documentary about Cuba’s underground internet network. Ms. Gillespie agreed to go to lunch together to discuss the project, and the meal lasted over six hours. As they walked back to work, Mr. Pérez Abrahantes had to restrain himself from kissing her. “From that day, I knew I was crazy about her,” he said.
Ms. Gillespie, 35, was born in Yonkers, N.Y. and raised mostly in New Milford, Conn. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who’s worked on such films as “Whose Streets?”, about the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, which was nominated for a Peabody Award. She received a bachelor’s of fine arts from N.Y.U.
Mr. Pérez Abrahantes, 38, was born in Matanzas, Cuba. Though he now also works as a producer and post-professional in documentary films, he was formerly the head of audio visual operations at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba in Havana, a nonprofit promoting Cuban artists. He received his bachelor’s in computer science from Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, also in Havana.
After their long lunch, Ms. Gillespie was interested as well. “We were both trying to be professional, but as time wound on, it became impossible to deny that there was a genuine connection,” she said. “An intellectual, spiritual connection.”
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Their resistance wore down at a party for the artist Carlos Garaicoa at the Havana Biennial in April. “We’d had a couple drinks,” Ms. Gillespie said. “We may have been wearing glow sticks.” Within the week, they had essentially moved in together.
It was a “terribly romantic” time, Ms. Gillespie remembered, as Mr. Pérez Abrahantes whisked her to his favorite places around Havana in the evenings and to different provinces in the countryside on the weekends. Neither wanted to consider what might come next.
Before Ms. Gillespie left for the airport in May, the couple sobbed together outside the bus. But their separation was short-lived: Mr. Pérez Abrahantes accepted a fellowship at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and moved to New York that July. Ms. Gillespie was living in Brooklyn, and they resumed their romance.
At the end of his fellowship, Mr. Pérez Abrahantes opted to overstay his visa under the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cubans to apply for a green card if they stay undocumented in the U.S. for a year. As the pandemic unfolded, the couple retreated to Ms. Gillespie’s mother’s home in Canton, Conn., where Mr. Pérez Abrahantes completed immigration paperwork and Ms. Gillespie tunneled into a film project about Judy Malinowski, who testified in her own murder trial after being set on fire by an ex-boyfriend.
“She was very supportive of me during those months, and she was working like hell on a movie that was so important to her,” Mr. Pérez Abrahantes said. “I think of her as a force of nature. She never gives up.”
The hard work paid off: Mr. Pérez Abrahantes, who is now working as a freelance documentary filmmaker, received his green card in January 2021, and became a citizen in October 2024. He arrived on Ms. Gillespie’s arm when she received an Emmy in 2023 for her film on Ms. Malinowski, “The Fire That Took Her.”
Amid these accomplishments, in May 2022, Mr. Pérez Abrahantes proposed to Ms. Gillespie in Varadero, Cuba, under a tree his late mother had planted. “I had a feeling he was going to propose, because he’s not great at keeping a secret,” Ms. Gillespie said. What she hadn’t anticipated is that friends from Cuba and the U.S. were hiding nearby to celebrate.
Many of the same friends and family — just over 100 guests — gathered in Cuba once again on Feb. 15 to watch the couple marry in Havana’s Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Caridad, in a bilingual Catholic ceremony officiated by the Rev. Ariel Suárez, a Catholic priest. The celebration offered many classically Cuban tropes, like a cigar roller and a fleet of midcentury convertibles to shuttle guests to the reception.
The country where they fell in love and married will find its way into their shared work, Ms. Gillespie vowed. “I keep trying to get him to make his Cuban opus. I’ll produce it!” she said. “That’ll be our big debut together.”
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