Public Graphics in Cuba

A Very Cuban Form of Internationalist Art

Bibliographic Data

ID4501566
AuthorsDavid Kunzle (corresponding author)
Year1975
Volume2
Issue4
Pages89-110
Publication date1975-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLatin American Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-582X • E-ISSN: 1552-678X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0094582x7500200407
OpenAlexW1975280907
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited1

The isolation of Cuba from the rest of the Americas has been more complete in the economic and political than in the cultural spheres. Cuba has continued to exchange ideas even when and where exchange of goods was impossible. The thrust towards a global role, the refusal to segregate nationalist from international perspectives, and the relative independence the nation has preserved with the respect to its major political and economic ally, the Soviet Union, have given Cuban culture since the Revolution a unique stamp of what we may term ''eclectic autonomy. This much is apparent from the study undertaken here of Cuban public graphics posters, vallas (billboards), and magazine illustration. Those visual media which continue in the commercial art of the bourgeois West to plumb new depths of moral and aesthetic abasement, have attained, by common consent of critics in bourgeois and socialist countries alike, a higher standard in Cuba today than anywhere else in Latin America. The very media which in pre-revolutionary Cuba were the most completely subservient to consumerism, have effected a dramatic transition for which there is no precedent anywhere. All the arts in Cuba theatre, music, dance, literature have undergone a radical transformation; but it is in the visual mass media which capitalism evolved to serve its own specific and historic needs, that the transition to socialist values appears the most extraordinary. Cultural contradictions become visible when a society is in crisis. They were particularly crass in Cuba on the eve of the Revolution because of the developed state of the media generally, television, the press, advertising and fashion being in many respects closer to the U.S. model in character and intensity than elsewhere in Latin America. The first issues of the lavish popular magazine Carteles to appear after the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959, applauded the tyrant Batista's downfall, and documented his terrible repression. In the most bizarre and absurd juxtaposition, opposite a full page advertisement for Testivital, a sexual energizer composed of turtle glands, lobster and locust organs, sheep's testicles, bull's brains, etc., appeared a page of photographs of tortured bodies and a special machine for extracting fingernails. Other advertisements at this time

Art · Economic history · Graphics · Political science · Visual arts · Cuban History and Society · History

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