Published in 2018, the book draws on Cromwell’s long stays in Havana with her friend Milagros and builds its visual narrative around La Charada, a commonly played underground Cuban lottery with roots in Chinese laborers. Coming to Cuba in the late 1800s to work on sugar plantations and build the country’s railroad, immigrant workers brought with them centuries-old Chinese traditions of lotteries and games of chance. Today, Cromwell’s friend Milagros and many other Cubans embrace the lottery and the way it imbues everyday moments with meaning. Numbers from one to one hundred correspond with specific objects and experiences (with numbers one through thirty-six drawn from Chinese culture), so bets are made based on signs gleaned from one’s day-to-day experiences or even dreams. For example, the number seventy-three corresponds with park, razor, apples, suitcase, chess, and cigarette. Because each number’s collection of associations has both positive and negative connotations, a layer of interpretation gives La Charada the power of subjectivity: Is the perfect apple you ate at lunch or the razor you cut your cheek with this morning the meaningful narrative of the day?
Understood through the lens of La Charada, the viewer is drawn to the details in each image in El Libro Supremo de la Suerte: beachgoers partially buried in sand; a proud cigar-smoking man sporting large rings and staring down the camera; an intimate snapshot of artificial flowers. What do these elements signify? What is the larger meaning of seemingly simple moments? “I work to make everyday things more monumental through the act of photographing them. And that was something I felt that Milagros was doing the way she would look at her everyday and assign a number to what would happen, and making it more monumental that way,” says Cromwell.