Catalogue | Designed in Cuba: Cold War Graphics

The Cuban poet, political theorist and now national icon José Martí wrote that “of all the crafts, the one I prefer is printing, because it has made the biggest contribution to human dignity”. 

 Print was a vital tool of the Cuban revolutionary government after it took power in 1959. Designers and illustrators working for the state produced posters for their compatriots that promoted revolutionary ideas and cultural events. What is less well known is that posters and other printed media were being produced for distribution outside the island nation, too.

I first became aware of Cuban graphic design for export when I visited Mike Stanfield – an avid collector of Cuban art and the owner of a complete set of the posters and magazines produced by non-governmental organisation Ospaaal (the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America). 

Ospaaal was based in Cuba, but was the headquarters of a global network of non-aligned countries and national liberation movements across the three continents. From the 1960s to the 1990s, it produced posters and illustrated magazines that were sent out around the world to express support for struggles against colonial rule and to condemn all forms of imperialistic action.

I was amazed by the bold design and insistent messages I saw in the posters, and the searing editorial illustration created for Ospaaal’s magazine, Tricontinental, a digest of radical political writing. I began planning an exhibition and accompanying publication that would explore the way that Ospaaal’s designers responded to the extraordinary context of revolutionary Cuba’s commitment to global solidarity. 

I travelled to Ospaaal’s headquarters in the central Havana district of Vedado, where I found remarkable photographs of the 1966 Tricontinental conference and a copy of Fighting Hymns, a 1970s album of revolutionary songs and the organisation’s only musical release. 

I had hoped to find documents that would illuminate the complex networks that enabled tens of thousands of posters and magazines to travel from Havana’s Frederic Engels print shop to the world – but no documentation had survived. However, I was able to interview some of the designers who created iconic images during Ospaaal’s most active period in the very building they had worked in. 

The recollections of Olivio Martínez Viera, Rafael Enríquez Vega and Rafael Morante Boyerizo have formed the basis for the exhibition and publication. The designers’ brief was to distil Cuba’s position on complex geopolitics into concise images that could be widely understood. Their posters featured minimal text: brief headings applied using western Letraset type in Spanish, French and English. 

With this in mind, the publication gives most space to images, captioned with the same period typefaces. It opens with a 1966 poster by Reinhilde Suárez featuring a stylised rendering of a robust fist gripping a rifle with a globe above. Her symbol of armed resistance was used as Ospaaal’s logo until the organisation closed this year, just weeks after I had visited, making Designed in Cuba a timely record of a compelling episode in Cuba’s graphic art history.