Many eras have passed in Cuba since Fidel Castro took office in 1959 after the Revolution, but the special character of the graphic art spawned in that chaotic, fertile moment has endured, as this volume shows. In Cuba, posters were, and continue to be, popular tools to disseminate ideas, to encourage the Cuban people in the construction of a new society and to spread information on government programs and/or propaganda. The ideal democratic art form, poster art as it has flourished in Cuba also developed a unique idiom in film, music and sports. Today, many of these works, by celebrated poster artists such as Olivio Martinez Viera, Alfredo Rostgaard, Félix Beltrán, Rafael Morante, Eduardo Marin, Olivio Martinez, Antonio Fernández Reboiro, Rafael Morante Boyerizo, René Cardenas Azcuy, Victor Manuel Navarrete and Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, are counted among the greatest posters produced in the twentieth century. In this overview of the subject, the influence of American Pop art and psychedelia, as well as earlier precedents in Dadaism, the Russian avant-garde and German Expressionism, can be seen to have informed Cuba’s graphic arts. Mira Cuba collects more than 250 posters, sketches and layouts created between 1959 and the present.
Featured poster is reproduced from Mira Cuba: The Cuban Poster Art from 1959.