Tourist photos in Havana: LF plus darkroom in a box

A few days ago I was in Havana and the tourist tour I was on found its way
to the front steps of the Capitol Building there, one of many important
national sites for the Cuban people. At the bottom of the steps stood four
or five photographers with old-looking LF cameras on tripods offering their
service: for a couple of dollars they take your picture sitting on the steps
and two or three minutes later present you with a wet composite
photograph -- you on the steps, surmounted by the Capitol Dome, and
subtitled "Havana Cuba." In the warm Havana sun, the print, on RC paper,
dries in a few minutes.

It's a wonderful gimmick for a photo history geek like me and, of course, I
paid for the pleasure.

The gear these photographers use are cobbled together LF cameras, some with
comparatively recent camera fronts & lenses of Speed Graphics, but some with
older type lenses (perhaps from scavenged/cannibalized 9x12cm or larger
cameras) with clearly jammed up and useless aperture and shutter controls.
Shutter control is done with a lens cap, timed by the photographer's sense
of what is appropriate. The lenses and bellows are held in place with
layers and layers of black electrical tape.

The photographer who took my picture made his exposure and then processed it
inside the camera box, with his hand stuck in through a lightproof sleeve
while watching through a little eye-sized window on top. He obviously had
chemicals inside his camera while his tripod held a little open pouch of
water. A red filtered window on the sunny side of the box provided safe
light. Using another side window on the sunny side (this one with a yellow
filter in it), he apparently transferred the image from the negative to the
positive paper. I was given both images (positive and negative) afterwards.
The wash was for about two seconds in the tripod's pouch. The whole
process, from pose to print took about four minutes.

The surmounted dome image and the subtitle must have been made from
ready-made masks inside the camera. The prints are quite small: the image
of me, my wife and mother-in-law sitting on the steps is only about four by
five cm. The entire composite photo is about six by seven cm.

I was impressed by the ingenuity of Cubans everywhere to bring various
technologies down to the hand-made and hand-operated. This was a lovely
photographic example. Has anyone seen this technique (which seems to me to
have been possible anytime in the past hundred years) elsewhere?

Philip Hiscock