Bint photoBooks on INTernet Auctiva Emporium: bintphotobooks

Havana

¶ Even during a hectic week in Havana, I could not resist checking out the lettering in this wonderful city. This architectural jewel of the Americas finds itself in a unique situation: it has been relatively isolated from the Western world since Castro seized power in 1958, and it still very much relives and reinforces that revolution. Art and culture developed here at a different pace and with emotions and passions not seen anywhere else.

¶ The early Cuban typography is intimately connected with its violent past. Typographers were basically printers. One of the first printers was Eduardo Facciolo (1829-1852), who was executed because he printed in Havana the clandestine newspaper "La Voz del Pueblo Cubano" (The Voice of Cuban People), of the so-called Conspiracy of Vuelta Abajo, which was planning an uprising in Candelaria, Pinar del Rio. Another typographer who got swept up by political turmoil was J.C. Campos, who in 1880 initiated contact between Cuban and Spanish anarchists upon his return to Havana after having taken refuge in New York during the Ten Year War. It was the first openly anarchist presence in Cuba. In the Anarchist Archives, we read that in 1924, "the first General Secretary of the National Confederation of Cuban Workers (CNOC) was the anarchist typographer, Alfredo Lopez." So, the combined energies of the Cuban press were largely absorbed by political activism.

¶ The fifties must have been something else in Cuba. First the ten-year long party, night and day, thrown by major artists, authors and Hollywood stars, with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Brigitte Bardot roaming Havana's cafes. And then came the revolution in 1958 that saw Fidel Castro rise to power, and that would later have its own martyr, hero and role model, Che Guevara. Social trauma like that is bound to kindle the creative spirits of any artist. For example, Cuban posters had to change attitudes and influence the people, and thus, we saw the development of a Cuban poster movement [see Richard Frick's book: "Plakatkunst der kubanischen Revolution" (RiFri-Edition, 1998, ISBN 3-9521229-0-4]. For more on Cuban poster art, see the Cuban poster project, the Berkeley-Cuba project, the book by Lincoln Cushing of UC Berkeley entitled "?Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art" (Chronicle Books, 2003), or visit this link.

¶ In 2001, he great Cuban poster designer and children's book illustrator Eduardo Munoz Bachs (b. Valencia, Spain, 1937) died in Havana. He made his first poster in 1960, for the ICAIC, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica, which was founded shortly after the Cuban revolution to produce and promote Cuban films. This page states: "Bachs made over 2000 movie posters for them. He is counted among the greatest cuban poster designers, .. el maestro del cartel cubano de todos los tiempos, and has contributed, together with Raul Martinez, Antonio Fernandez Reboiro, Felix Beltran, Rene Azcuy, Rene Mederos, Antonio Perez Gonzalez "Niko" and Alfredo Gonzalez Rostgaard, to the international admiration that the colorful cuban posters of the 1970's have enjoyed." Sadly, he made his last poster in 2001.

¶ I do not know of a lot of type design activity in Cuba. Some Cuban-born emigrants have made a reputation outside Cuba--for example, many know Carlos Segura, the founder of the T-26 type foundry in Chicago. Pablo A. Medina runs Cubanica Fonts in New York. In today's Cuba, typography is still an art of practice rather than creation, expressed by the original use of letters on posters, walls, buildings, and books. In the little spare time I had last week, I took some shots in the streets of old Havana and Havana's suburb, Viedado. The pictures, taken with two cheap digital cameras, are hastily put together. By clicking on them, you can get larger versions that reveal more typographic detail.

The pictures

Copyright © 2003 Luc Devroye
School of Computer Science
McGill University
Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6
[email protected]
http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/index.html

The roots of the Cuban poster tradition
Cuba is a literate nation of 11 million people. It is a small enough that posters are an eminently viable medium for reaching wide audiences. Havana is a cosmopolitan capital of 1 million, which has been a cultural nexus between the old world and the new ever since the "discovery" of the Americas in 1492. As in Europe and the United States, lithographs appeared in Cuba in the mid 1800's. The emergence of a booming film industry in the 1940s - and posters publicizing those films - led to the first distinctly domestic style. In 1943 the U.S. exhibit "Originals of Tamigraph: Silk Screen Originals," which included 55 works by 27 artists was a significant impetus for the emergence of fine-art screenprinting in Cuba. This also spawned work of a distinctly political nature, the birth of Cuban political poster art. During the 50s some artists applied their talents to printmaking, but it continued to remain no more a significant cultural form than painting or sculpture. However, it was the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista and the immense national transformation that followed that led to the "golden age" of Cuban posters. The non-commercial mass poster was the direct fruit of the revolution, a conscious application of art in the service of social improvement. State resources were allocated for a broad range of cultural and artistic projects, and posters were the right medium at the right time.

Poster production since the revolutionThe vast majority of posters produced in Cuba have been under the auspices of three agencies: Editora Politica, OSPAAAL (the Organization in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America), and ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute). Editora Politica (EP) is the official publishing department of the Cuban Communist Party, and is responsible for a wide range of (mostly) domestic public information propaganda in the form of books, brochures, billboards, and posters. In addition, many other agencies utilized the resources and distribution powers of EP for their own work, including FMC (the Federation of Cuban Women), the CNT (the National Confederation of Workers), and OCLAE (the Latin American Students Association). EP started out as the Commission of Revolutionary Orientation (COR, 1962-1974), then became the Department of Revolutionary Orientation (DOR, 1974-1984), and finally settled on Editora Politica in 1985.OSPAAAL is officially a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) recognized by the United Nations, based in Havana, Cuba and with a board of representatives from all over the world. It is the primary producer of international solidarity posters in Cuba. Among its many activities has been the publication of Tricontinental magazine since 1967. At its peak its circulation was 30,000 copies, produced in 4 different languages and mailed to 87 countries. Included in most issues were folded-up solidarity posters, thus establishing the most effective international poster distribution system in the world. ICAIC produces posters for all films made in Cuba, and for many years also created publicity posters for foreign films shown in Cuba as well. These posters were all of identical size to fit in special kiosks throughout Havana. There are, of course, other venues for poster production. The Taller Artistico Experimental de Serigrafía Rene Portocarrero, founded in 1983, is a fine-art studio in Havana, always abuzz with students and teachers. Other agencies also have small shops, such as ICAP (Instituto Cubana de Amistad entre los Pueblos, or the Cuban Institute for Friendship between the People). And finally, there are small job shops that will produce work for any commercial client.

Range of artistic content and styleOne of the characteristics that separates Cuban poster art from that of its historical antecedents - the Taller de Grafica Popular in Mexico in the 1930's, Polish film and political posters, and the state-sponsored posters of the Soviet Union and China - is the wide range of content and style. This is the result of several factors, including a long tradition of international influence in domestic artwork and a revolutionary government that was relatively open to experimentation and innovation. Although the "fine art" and "commercial art" worlds continue to exist in Cuba, a significant amount of resources and talent were funneled into challenging this capitalist dichotomy. Instead of selling products, artists could actually make a living using their skills to promote services and building community. Posters publicized motorcycle-based health brigades, joining the sugar harvest, working in the sugar mills efficiently, or planting healthy fruits and vegetables on available land. Some crops, such as tobacco, posed challenges; one poster pleads for "Your youthful hand" in helping the harvest , but another warns that "Tobacco burns health." Sports, education, and culture play a significant role; one poster for an armed forces chess tournament displays a commitment to play for keeps, another proudly proclaims "I am studying to be a teacher,"and a third uses a decidedly take-no-prisoners approach in promoting a conference on writers and artists.

International solidarity is an important part of the Cuban culture, especially because the struggle against U.S. imperialism was being fought on Cuban shores. This deep connection to other underdeveloped countries struggling for self-determination resulted in many works succinctly and elegantly showing resistance against colonialism and U.S. imperialism. The persistent theme of "As in Viet Nam" underscores a deep national determination to be as self-reliant, brave, and resourceful as the people of Viet Nam, equating domestic food and industrial production with the urgency of armed struggle.Although most of the posters are produced in offset format, many of them (and all the older ICAIC posters) were done in silkscreen, in limited numbers. Many of the more popular ICAIC posters have been reissued, sometimes multiple times, to meet the demand for sales. Almost all of the stencils for the screenprinted posters were cut by hand, even many of the ones that "look" like large-dot photostencils.

The current situation
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in the mid-1990's, Cuba has been laboring under what has been officially described as the "special period". Economically, the country went into a tailspin, losing favorable trade agreements, oil and sugar subsidies, and technical assistance almost overnight. Ever since then, Cuba has followed a path of rebuilding its economy through international tourism. Massive joint-venture projects with Spain, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and other nations have focused almost entirely on the hotel and ancillary service industries. This process, though justifiable given Cuba's limited options, has resulted in considerable distortion of the cultural fabric. All the poster-producing agencies have had to transform themselves from State subsidy to having to rely on fee-for-service to become self-supporting. Although an organization such as ICAIC may have a chance at pulling this off, agencies with an explicit political message such as EP or OSPAAAL are withering on the vine. This belt-tightening has affected art production in every way. Even billboard design favors use of white space because ink is in short supply.

The task ahead
Posters are a vital, expressive visual art which have historically been a medium of choice for presenting oppositional voices. Unfortunately, the timeless issues they raise are usually eclipsed by their short lifespan in the public record. A variety of factors conspire to dramatically limit the number of poster images which not only survive, but are available to researchers, organizers, and the viewing public. These include physical deterioration (bad ink/paper stability, staining and tearing due to poor display techniques, fading from exposure to sunlight, infestation by bugs and rot, damage from improper storage, etc.), irreversible damage and loss (insecure storage resulting in fire and water damage, posters being thrown out as trash), and privatization (posters being bought up by collectors/dealers). Cuba is no exception. As in the rest of the world, the very agencies which produced the works had devoted little energy to preserving them. An example of this a request by OSPAAAL in 1998 for display copies for an exhibit on Che Guevara; the agency did not have eight of the 18 different posters they had produced, and I was able to send down giant digital prints from archives created by the Cuba Poster Project.

Because of the irreplaceable political and cultural heritage represented by this ephemeral art, I have been working with other independent poster curators (primarily Michael Rossman, an independent archivist, and Carol Wells, of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles) to develop an approach for documenting and cataloguing the images and information in such a way that these works will forever remain potent voices of change. We seek to empower poster-producing organizations to preserve their own visual history and allow them to breathe new life into images that were created many years ago. Because we are also concerned with preserving oppositional poster art in general, we see the documentation of "small" collections to be key pieces in the construction of a major archive of domestic and international posters. Much of this is based on recent developments in the digitization of images and databases that have only recently become affordable to smaller collections. One of the wonderful features of a digital catalog is that it is possible to build a complete "collection" without possession of the actual artifact, thus freeing producing agencies from the whole separate difficult task of poster collection and conservation. An image-rich database means that poster images can be quickly located and compared without reliance on curatorial memory or access to the actual poster.

Lincoln Cushing, Docs Populi - Documents for the Public [email protected]