NOTES FOR A CHRONOLOGY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN IN CUBA
(FROM 1950 UP TO THE PRESENT)
Pepe Menéndez

1.1950 to 1958: The Age of Advertising Agencies
Severe social and economic contradictions accumulated in Cuba in the last decade of its first republican period which resulted in an armed uprising and the subsequent seizure of power by the guerrilla men in January 1959.
In the field of social communication the advertising agencies in U.S. style had imposed themselves. Their number grew until totaling more than 30, influencing both the printed media and almost entirely television, which had started in Cuba precisely in the middle of the century. McCann Erickson, Guastella, Siboney, Mestre-Conill and OTPLA were some of the leading agencies. There were also two outstanding local advertising divisions: those of the soap and perfume companies Crusellas and Sabatés.
Havana had a modern and efficient graphic industry. Lithographic printing attained high quality; there were several rotary presses, photogravure and offset machines and tens of small typographic printing shops.
The advertising agencies, printing houses and large mass media consortiums of the United States used to test their new techniques and technologies in Cuba. The Island also served as a platform for the launching of products and slogans to the Latin American market, all of which explains in part the development of both advertising and the graphic industry in Cuba in this decade. The photographic language had attained clear predominance with the relevant contributions of two photographic studios: Buznego’s, the leading one for years, and the Korda studio, which contributed the renewal.
There was an organized guild of professionals of communication, with their yearbooks, clubs and prizes. The Professional School of Advertising was founded in 1954. However, it was not a period of great individual personalities as had been the case of Valls, Massaguer, Blanco and García Cabrera in previous decades. Nevertheless, Enrique Céspedes, Luis Martínez Pedro, Mario Masvidal and Carlos Ruiz should be mentioned among the most outstanding in these years.
Cuba had a rich tradition of names and trademarks in the field of consumer goods. In like manner, containers, labels and packing had covered a fruitful road since the 19th century, in the very first place with cigars but also with cigarettes, rums and beers. These products, their names and trade slogans became expressions of the Cuban cultural identity (for instance, of Cuban humor: «Matusalem Rum: happy today, tomorrow okay»). Cigar packing, which is a true patrimony of Cuban visual arts, had an imagery in which the representations of the natural and human landscape added values to Cuban culture.
The editorial market was quite unequal. On one hand, there existed multiple magazines and newspapers (particularly in the capital) and on the other hand the book industry had little development. Non-commercial or public welfare communication campaigns were also scarce; the poster production was restricted to the film promotion (a specialty in which designer and printer Eladio Rivadulla, who had been a pioneer of serigraphy in Cuba since the previous decade became well-known) and to a Manichean political proselytism.

2. 1959 to 1964: A Change of Paradigm
The Revolution was a deep transformation of society in all its spheres, in a continuous but not linear process. Social communication was of course affected by these changes, which gave graphic design a radically different outlook. It was a period of foundation: new issuers of communication arose, messages changed and the receivers ceased to be potential consumers to become addressees of political, social, educational and cultural messages. 1
The new society inherited a well-trained professional sector in advertising. Many remained in their jobs until the owners of the agencies abandoned them and left the country. With the subsequent nationalizations, designers became state employees. Those who remained in Cuba and carried out the change of paradigm that took place in Cuban graphic design were almost all under 30 years of age and to a greater or lesser extent shared the ideas proposed by the Revolution.
In the ideological confrontation of the early years, advertising was considered harmful, and in 1961 the Government definitely suppressed the ads in radio, television and the press. Aesthetical prejudices and strong debates also occurred, but design succeeded in general in imposing its freedom of expression and the creators were respected.
The two main designer groups that appeared in these years were the Advertising Group of Enterprises (in 1960) and the Intercomunicaciones agency (in 1961). The former executed the advertising contracts that existed until 1961 and the latter complied with the communication tasks commissioned by the governmental agencies (ministries,
enterprises, etc.).
Intercomunicaciones (with creators such as Guillermo Menéndez,Tony Évora, Joaquín Segovia and Silvio Gaytán in the first stage, plus Olivio Martínez, José Papiol, René Mederos, Ernesto Padrón and Faustino Pérez, among others, in a second period) finally merged in 1967 with a group of designers who carried out the Government’s graphic propaganda in the Comisión de Orientación Revolucionaria (Commission for Revolutionary Guidance, COR).
The new contexts in which graphic design was developing and the contents it had to transmit required forms that differed from those that had predominated until then. For some time, though, there was superposition of contents and antagonistic forms. Advertising –adapting to the new times– attempted to show a more nationalist vocation in the positioning of products, and propaganda still had not found its own language. The changes did not take place by command but due to the intrinsic requirements of that historical moment.
In 1959, two very important cultural institutions in the history of Cuban graphics were founded: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Institute for Cinematographic Art and Industry, ICAIC) and Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas). At ICAIC the first designer team was made up by Rafael Morante, Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, Raúl Oliva and Holbein López, with Eladio Rivadulla as printer of serigraphies. In the following years René Azcuy, Antonio Pérez Ñiko, Antonio Fernández Reboiro, Luis Vega and Julio Eloy Mesa worked systematically in this agency, among others.
The diversity of styles among them is noteworthy, as also the intensity of their production. At times they went as far as to design a weekly poster each. Such continuous demand of solutions endowed them with a very efficient capacity of response, with results that have been widely praised and awarded. Since the mid ‘60s, the ICAIC posters had the same format (52 x 76 cm) and technique (serigraphy) plus a group of prolific creators (Bachs, Azcuy, Ñiko and Reboiro being the leading ones), which contributed to make them a consistent group of promotional graphics that remained in existence for several decades.
Casa de las Américas, in turn, created in 1960 the journal of the same name, in which Umberto Peña worked with great creativeness from 1965 until the late 1980s. Umberto Peña maintained his links with Casa for more than twenty years, in a creator-entity relationship that may be considered one of the most fruitful in the history of Cuban design, perhaps only to be compared with that of Eduardo Muñoz Bachs and his posters with ICAIC. With the large number of media designed by him, Peña contributed to Casa de las Américas what today we would call a corporative visual identity.
On the other hand, with form and contents considered a renewal in Cuba, the first issue of Lunes de Revolución, a supplement of the daily Revolución, appeared in 1959. In certain cases, the experiments that the Lunes... design team carried out in the relationship typography - photography - illustration may be regarded as forerunner of the Cuban posters created afterwards, whose mature expression appeared toward the mid ‘60s. Its leading designers were Jacques Brouté (Frenchman living in Cuba, in the initial stage), Tony Évora (second stage) and Raúl Martínez (third stage). The publication ceased to exist in 1961.
In these years, posters exerted a preponderant role as a means of spreading information. The life of Cubans became very intense in the streets, in public places; there was much social exchange for reasons of work, study, recreation or military training. Under such circumstances the always-present poster served as efficient communicator, regardless of its greater or lesser quality. Still without a graphic style or peculiar forms to characterize Cuban design, some of the most significant posters of this initial period stand out more for the circumstances in which they appeared than for a remarkable quality.
«It should be recalled that the communicative efficiency of such visual objects was more a result of the social significance of the event they were interpreting and transmitting than of the intrinsic values of their conception and achievement as a graphic work» (Bermúdez, J., 2000:.89) Such are the cases of the designs for the campaign against illiteracy of 1961 and the posters to mobilize and alert the population created in the context of the October Crisis of 1962.
1961 saw the creation of the National Council for Culture (CNC). Some of its designers in the initial years were: Rolando and Pedro de Oraá, José Manuel Villa, Umberto Peña, Raúl Martínez, Héctor Villaverde, César Mazola, Rafael Zarza, Ricardo Reymena and Juan Boza. Its social purpose was the promotion of events and cultural institutions, and they also engaged in magazine design.
Together with ICAIC, within a few years the CNC team was at the vanguard of the Cuban poster, but unlike the former it did not achieve the same stability as to authors, formats and reproduction technique. Unfortunately, the poster production at CNC has not been preserved in archives or collections; this fact, added to the prejudices and marginalizing in which the cultural circles were involved in the following decade, caused the dilution of the true relevance of that production in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
This period closes with a clear intention of renewal. The visual proposals were gradually ripening in a numerically large and young generation that longed for achievements, which created inside a social reality in transformation and dared to try new things, adapting their creations to very demanding circumstances. On one hand were the extreme economic restrictions of a blocked country and on the other the utopian lack of inhibition.

3. 1965 to 1975: The Ripening of a Way of Doing Things
A characterization of the context in which the new graphics in Cuba was conformed must take into consideration that: a) the country’s transformation dynamics produced a constant demand of visual communication and b) the designers were gathered in institutions that enabled them to constantly exercise their practice with great liberty of expression.
In terms of marketing, there was a climax in which offer and demand balanced. That climax can be said to have lasted some 10 years and is considered by many experts as the most fertile stage in the history of our graphic design. Some authors refer to it as «the Golden Age» of Cuban design.
The demand was expressed, for example, in a printing boom. At its highest point the printing industry reached annual figures of 700 titles and 50 million copies, in a country with a population of around 7 million. The number of newspapers had decreased but the magazines proliferated and the new publishing houses created a varied range of book collections. The poster production shot up tremendously, with the largest part in terms of figures concentrated in three entities: ICAIC, COR and CNC, that is, film, political propaganda and cultural promotion posters (excluding movies).
By way of example it can be said that when ICAIC celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1979, an exhibition was organized with the impressive title 1000 Cuban Film Posters (oddly, the most represented years were the final ones of the 65-75 decade: 1974 with 171 pieces and 1975 with 125; as to the authors, 284 posters by Eduardo Muñoz Bachs were selected). In lack of advertising, there was an increase of public welfare campaigns in which new media such as city billboards and portfolios remarkably grew in importance.
Although for many years Cuba was an isolated country and the change that took place in these years had endogenous foundations, external influences should not be ignored. In 1964 Tadeusz Jodlowski, professor at the Higher Academy of Fine Arts of Warsaw traveled to Cuba to give a course to the CNC designers. This first direct meeting with the Polish school of design –so different from the U.S. aesthetic codes in vogue in Cuba since the ‘50s– was useful for the young local creators.
This continued furthermore in the subsequent stays in Poland of César Mazola (in 1965), Héctor Villaverde (in 1966) and Rolando de Oraá (in 1967), for a six-month study period under the tutorship of Henryk Tomaszewski. Other antecedents that compare with this professional upgrading outside the Island were the Art and Design studies by Félix Beltrán in first-rank universities of the United States at the opening of the decade and the higher studies made by Esteban Ayala at the Higher School of Graphics and Book Design in Leipzig, German Democratic Republic (from 1962 to 1966).
In 1969, the Polish graphic designers Wiktor Gorka, Waldemar Swierzy and Bronislaw Zelek traveled to Havana. Other visits with an impact in Cuban graphic design in subsequent years were those of Shigeo Fukuda in 1970 and 1987 (the latter with an exhibition of his posters at the Higher Institute of Art); of Albert Kapr in 1983 (two years later his book 101 Rules for Book Design was published in Cuba), of Jorge Frascara and Gui Bonsieppe on several occasions between 1980 and 1990, and more recently of Norberto Chávez, Rubén Fontana, Alain Le Quernec and Isidro Ferrer.
It must be understood that starting in the early ’60s the trips of Cubans abroad were scarce, as well as the visits of foreigners to the Island. The «contact zones» between Cuban graphic design and the world were restricted for many years, particularly in the decades of the ’60s and ‘70s, with the exception of the already mentioned examples plus some international magazines and books in the midst of a state of incommunication with the world.
The first attempt of a Cuban design magazine occurred in 1970 when the COR published Diseño. Only three numbers were issued, all of which came out that year. In 1973 the same agency published Materiales de Propaganda (later Propaganda), a publication that has lasted up to our days, but with a very irregular sequence.
Cuba, a magazine conceived to show the world the reality of the country, appeared in 1962. This publication (whose direct predecessor was called INRA) developed a highly visual and dynamic editorial profile for its time and environment, to which it added the talent of both designers and photographers. Initially the Art and Photography Direction was held by José Gómez Fresquet Frémez, who was followed by Rafael Morante.
Héctor Villaverde succeeded him from 1967 through 1977. For many years it also received the contributions of Roberto Guerrero and several other designers like Luis Gómez and Jorge Chinique. The team of photographers included Alberto Díaz (Korda) and Raúl Corrales in the first period and José A. Figueroa, Iván Cañas, the Swiss Luc Chessex, Enrique de la Uz, Luis Castañeda and Nicolás Delgado in the decade of the ‘70s.
Alongside with Cuba, the most relevant magazines during this period were La Gaceta de Cuba (created in 1962 with design by Tony Évora); Pueblo y Cultura and Revolución y Cultura (since 1963), publications that were different but related and where Héctor Villaverde and José Gómez Fresquet Frémez participated in different periods; plus Tricontinental (created in 1967, designed by Alfredo Rostgaard).In the mid ‘60s the Cuban poster began to draw attention in Europe and in some other important centers of the visual arts in the world. Through magazine articles and exhibitions, a peculiar social reality and a way to express it by means of design were making themselves known, all of which attracted attention and praise. Some of the most important exhibitions of this period were: 1968, Ewan Phillips Gallery, London; 1969, Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm; 1971, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Paris, and The Library of Congress (Film Section), Washington, all of them under the title Cuban Posters.
The poster was undoubtedly the most representative genre in the Cuban graphic boom in this period, so much so that it outshined other achievements that have received little attention until this day. Two extremes that opposed each other because of their respective scales were the design of exhibition spaces or urban graphics and the design of post stamps.
In the change of decade several interesting experiences were produced in the design of large spaces. Designer Félix Beltrán participated in the creation of the Cuban pavilions at the World Expos of Montreal ’67 and Osaka ’70, as part of teams led by architects (in the first case the Italians Sergio Varoni and Vitorio Garatti established in Cuba and in the second case Luis Lápidus).
Another exhibition whose graphic design granted it superior coherence and expressiveness was the international art show Del Tercer Mundo (From the Third World), Havana, 1968, whose design was conceived by José Gómez Fresquet Frémez. Also recalled are the supergraphics that covered the ICAIC building at the turn of each year, particularly the one from 1969, designed by Antonio Fernández Reboiro, and the one from 1970, due to Alfredo Rostgaard.
The post stamp design had a parallel evolution to that of posters and editorial design in these years. The predominant codes went from a realistic figuration to a more effective visual conceptualization. Several designers specialized in this kind of work and achieved some series where the aim at beauty that used to predominate and the required functionality of the stamp did not hinder the good design; well on the contrary, they found allies in it.
It was, however, a creator who worked at another agency who showed the greatest mastery for these minute pieces of communication. We owe Guillermo Menéndez some of the best achieved Cuban post stamps, as were those of the series International Year of Education (1970) and 20th Anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution (1979).
The average quality levels attained in the post stamp design during the decades of 1960 and 1970 were lost in the following years, and again the model of representation with pretensions of hyperrealism became predominant, both in the topics of fauna and nature and in the commemorative and sports ones, at times with a low performance in the drawings.
The Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) was created in 1966. This entity, together with ICAIC and DOR, may be regarded as the third great poster producer, more for their uniqueness and quality than for the number of its titles (around 340 in the first 40 years of existence; it should be mentioned that ICAIC’s historical production has been estimated between 2500 and 3000 posters; DOR’s production is calculated to have reached between 6000 and 8000).
The OSPAAAL posters were intended to transmit political messages of solidarity, mainly with processes of decolonization / social vindication / anti-imperialism in different Third World countries. Initially they were folded and inserted in Tricontinental magazine (whose print-run reached 50 000 copies). They used a small format and a graphic language that could be assimilated by individuals of different cultures and languages, granting preference to the image over the text. Alfredo Rostgaard was the most outstanding OSPAAAL poster artist. Also relevant were Lázaro Abreu, Olivio Martínez, Rafael Morante, Jesus Forjans, Faustino Pérez, Berta Abelenda and René Mederos.
The founding of the Cuban Book Institute (ICL) made it possible to reorganize the printing houses and their graphic profiles. Raúl Martínez, José Manuel Villa, Cecilia Guerra, Carlos Rubido and Luis Vega, among others, worked in the Art and Literature and Cuban Literature publishing houses; Roberto Casanueva and Francisco Masvidal did it with the Social Sciences publishing house. They raised book design within ICL to a high level of quality. In other institutions, Raúl Martínez and Tony Évora (Ediciones R), Fajad Jamis (Ediciones Unión) and Umberto Peña (Casa de las Américas) were the most outstanding artists in this period.
Books had ceased to be elitist objects and were now within reach of any citizen, a policy supported by the subsidizing of prices by the state in order to promote reading and therefore cultural enrichment. Cuban designs in this period were uninhibited, at times risky and although they respected certain basic rules they did not seem to assume them as unbreakable laws. In their covers there was more expressive search than typographic discipline.
Books on design have not abounded in Cuba. The prolific Félix Beltrán published Desde el diseño in 1970, Letragrafía (Pueblo y Educación publishing house) in 1973, and Acerca del diseño (Ediciones Unión) in 1975. In subsequent years there appeared El libro, su diseño, by creator Roberto Casanueva (Oriente publishing house, 1989), El cartel cubano de cine (Letras Cubanas publishing house, 1996) and La imagen constante. El cartel cubano del siglo xx, by design scholar Jorge Bermúdez (Letras Cubanas, 2000), first thorough study on this particular topic.
The sugar harvests, the country’s major economic event until recent years, were usually accompanied by abundant printed matter whose purpose it was to stimulate the labor consciousness of the workers. The advertising campaign on the 1970 sugar harvest –for which the government set a goal that had never been attained– had national scope, with design teams in each province.
A series of billboards and posters was conceived that announced the achievement of each partial goal. Unlike the profusion of figurative images (workers, cane fields, machinery and tools) by means of which the mobilization to the sugar harvest had been informed in previous years, this time Olivio Martínez elaborated very colorful typographic images that expressed the national euphoria that surrounded this huge productive goal. His serial conception achieved great interest.
This crucial economic and political event of the Cuban revolution left behind another poster that conveyed, not the euphoria with which the harvest had begun but the dismay of its frustrated end when the goal was not attained. Revés en Victoria (Setback into Victory) (COR, 1970) is a noteworthy example of economy of means that succeeds in visualizing in a synthetic and suggestive manner a popular phrase in those days.
Its authoress was Eufemia Álvarez, one of the several women who were outstanding in Cuban graphics in these years and who are not mentioned with the frequency and fairness they deserve. Her poster obtained one of the five prizes at the National Poster Salon in 1970, together with such relevant works as Besos robados (by René Azcuy), Viva el xvii Aniversario del 26 de Julio (by Félix Beltrán), ¿Quién le teme a Virginia Woolf? (by Rolando de Oraá) and Moler toda la caña y sacarle el máximo (by Antonio Pérez Ñiko).
The COR had organized the first Salon the year before focused solely on poster production.2 It was inaugurated with a large exhibition that showed selected works by 70 designers. Five designs that have become anthological with the passing of time received prizes: Cuba en Grenoble (by Raúl Martínez), Todos a la Plaza con Fidel (by Antonio Pérez Ñiko), Décimo aniversario del ICAIC (by Alfredo Rostgaard), Clik (by Félix Beltrán) and Décimo aniversario del triunfo de la rebelión (by the team made up by Ernesto Padrón, José Papiol and Faustino Pérez).
A breakdown of the prizewinners in the first ten editions of this National Poster Salon (later renamed «26 of July National Salon of Graphic Propaganda») shows other interesting facts: the 40 prizes awarded went to the hands of 26 designers, which means that there existed a balanced quality; three were won by women; the thematic breakdown shows 21 political, 12 cultural and 7 social posters. Also evidenced was the geographical distribution of the design activity in Cuba in those years, since works from several provinces were received and awarded, particularly from Matanzas and Santiago de Cuba.
In 1970 the book The Art of Revolution, of authors Susan Sontag and Dougald Stermer was published by McGraw-Hill Book. It represented an international backing to Cuban graphics, particularly because of Sontag’s essay and the splendid selection of posters displayed in a book of large format. The international echo obtained by Cuban graphics was already a fact at the opening of the ‘70s.
The initial awards had been obtained: a poster by Esteban Ayala in the German Democratic Republic, 1964; books by Santiago Armada Chago, Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, José Manuel Villa, Esteban Ayala and Félix Beltrán in Book Fairs (IBA) in Leipzig from 1965 to 1971; the poster Harakiri by Antonio Fernández Reboiro in Sri Lanka,1965, and finally the group of posters presented by Cuba at the International Film Poster Contest of the International Film Festival in Cannes, 1974, which obtained the first prize.
The moment of top splendor was thus reached, the consolidation of a style that responded to a very particular social situation. The generation that had carried it out was in its full maturity. There was, however, no relay in sight. The initial attempts to found a school of design, the School of Industrial and Informational Design within the Ministry of the Light Industry in 1969, had had no follow up nor taken any root.

4. From 1976 to 1989: Stagnation and Backwards
Important changes in the political-administrative and governmental structure occurred in this period in relation with the country’s entrance into the economic block of socialist countries.
A diversity of elements set up the crisis of the Cuban graphic design that became evident in these years:
- The visual code created in the ‘60s reached saturation and neither the visual-expressive renewal nor the human one –i.e., professionals with similar or better qualification than their predecessors– arrived in time.
– Work relations between designers and related professionals and their superiors became rigid, and a bureaucratic style of commission / approval of designs was established.
– Digital technology began to be introduced in Cuba toward the end of the ‘80s. Not all the active designers at the time succeeded in incorporating this technique to their work –which caused a sector of mature professionals to become excluded with regard to the young persons who were entering the sector– and which on the other hand enabled persons with little specific training in visual communication to produce design works in detriment of the resulting quality.
The crisis was well understood (at least by designers and specialists in this topic), but no solutions appeared. Apparently the institutions did not react to the signals: in 1978 the magazine Revolución y Cultura published a series of articles-surveys debating the crossroads that the national poster art had been facing already for some years. This statement was made by Raúl Martínez: «Perhaps we have rested too long upon our success; we, the artists who create (the posters) and the state agencies and officers that enthusiastically demanded us to create them and disseminate them at the same time». Still ten years later, in a report drawn up by professionals of communication and discussed in the institutions directly related with this activity, it was repeated that «in the last decade graphic design has presented a substantial reduction in both qualitative and quantitative aspects». The main elements that touch upon it are (I select some): the inexistence of an institutional policy for the promotion of graphic design; the professional and cultural limitations of the persons who conduct the institutions; the poor qualification of numerous persons who work as designers; the necessary renewal of designers that should be promoted by the specialized educational centers.
The Design Section of the Association of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), directed by Héctor Villaverde and Alfredo Rostgaard, organized the Graphic Design Meetings (the first one in 1979, the second in 1985) in an attempt to take the initiative and publicly debate the issues related with the profession, but giving the floor to the creators. Symptomatically, the event’s poster, created by Francisco Masvidal, shows the usual instruments used by designers at the time: cutting knife, brush, ink marking pen and pencil taking the form of missiles.
In those years, some outstanding designers definitely left the country (for instance Antonio Fernández Reboiro and Félix Beltrán; Tony Évora had already done it long before) and others leave their work posts (Umberto Peña, Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, René Azcuy). The Cuban graphic design is in an open crisis. The National Bureau for Industrial Design (ONDI) includes among its priority tasks the training of designers and founds the Polytechnic Institute of Industrial Design in 1983 and the Higher Institute of Industrial Design (ISDI) in 1984, the latter being the first –and sole up to the present– design university in Cuba, which graduated its first 21 students in 1989, nine of them as information designers.
The initial teaching staff at ISDI was mainly made up by architects. Antonio Cuan Chang, trained as a professor in Basic Design at the Faculty of Architecture, headed the Information Design Faculty since its opening until 1993. The two great exceptions to this trend were Esteban Ayala and the Chilean professor Hugo Rivera.
Architects, with their dominion of the form-generating laws and the Gestalt had attained a certain success in Cuban graphics since the ‘70s, particularly in the creation of logotypes. At a time when open contests to identify events and institutions became frequent, architects proved to be very accurate.
Whether or not they resulted from public contests, some logotypes of great visibility have existed until this day because of their pregnant nature and marking efficiency, as in the case of Coppelia ice cream (by Guillermo Menéndez, 1964), Ministry of Construction and Lenin Park (both by Félix Beltrán, ‘70s), Ministry of the Fishing Industry (René Azcuy, ‘70s), Cubana de Aviación airlines (by Juan Antonio Gómez Tito, ‘70s) and Asociación Cubana de Artesanos Artistas (Antonio Cuan Chang, 1980).
The growth of the light industry that took place in the decade of the ‘70s gave rise to a development in the packaging design. Whole systems of marks, labels and packaging were created at the Packaging Design and Dissemination Center particularly for the food products sector. Cuban cigars and their promotion abroad were also included in this sector. Among the members of that team were Luis Rolando Potts, Antonio Goicochea, Santiago Pujol and Carlos Espinosa Vega; the first three represented the not very numerous intermediate generation that followed the initiators from the ’60s and preceded the new group from the ‘90s.
In 1977 and 1978, on the occasion of the celebration in Cuba of the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students, urban graphics acquired great force in Havana. Designer Darío Mora, as part of multi-disciplinary teams formed by architects, town planners and engineers, conceived the so-called super-graphics that filled zones of great circulation in Havana.
The René Portocarrero Silkscreen Workshop was founded in 1983. Along these years, many posters have been printed there for artists and young troubadours. Also in silkscreen but with another purpose, a number of poster series were designed at the National Institute for Tourism (INTUR) –formerly National Institute for the Tourist Industry (INIT)– with a coherence that made them relatively distinguishable. Produced in the second half of the ‘70s to promote specific tourist destinations or elements of the country’s flora and fauna, they were destined for international tourism but turned out to be very attractive also for Cubans, who bought them and used them to decorate their homes. A geometrical, intensely colored drawing predominated in them, almost always finished off by black lines. Their authors were Jorge Hernández, Armando Alonso, Arnoldo Jordi, Raymundo García, Enrique Vidan and Francisco Yanes Mayán.
A magazine that consolidated a very attractive visual nature for its time, supported by the use of the Avant Garde types when the publishing design preferred Swiss typographies was Mar y Pesca, under the art direction of Jacques Brouté. Other periodicals that emerged or became relevant in those years were: Opina (designed by Arístides Pumariega), El Caimán Barbudo (where several designers have worked in almost four decades of existence) and Juventud Técnica (in the decade of the ‘80s, with a very attractive visual dynamics for young people, based on illustration and designed by Carlos Alberto Masvidal).

5. 1990 to the Present: Crisis and a New Opportunity
The crisis that graphic design had been facing for years was overshadowed by a much greater one: the crisis in the national economy as a result of the collapse of socialism in Europe, which had devastating consequences for the creation, reproduction and circulation of products and visual messages.
As part of the turmoil endured by the communications system at the opening of the ‘90s, many designers withdrew from the design bureaus or agencies, in a social context that also tended to lesser centralization.
The above-mentioned should not be regarded as contradictory with the fact that advertising agencies proliferated (they even reached the number of 15) to comply with the demands of communication in corporate identity and primary advertising of the emerging entrepreneurial sector, linked particularly to international tourism, and with the appearance of enterprises of mixed Cuban-foreign capital, two of the main alternatives applied by the Government to overcome the crisis. This period thus experienced as a novelty the relatively harmonious coexistence of independent designers with institutional teams and advertising agencies, or one individual practicing both forms.
The levels of conceptualization and visualization reached in the business / entrepreneurial sector in this period were low, particularly in terms of the advertising discourse, since the prolonged, more than 30-year gap had to be put up with. Neither the creators nor the directives of the agencies had any experience, and much less the entrepreneurs. Advertising returned shyly; to the ordinary citizen it became evident in the shopping centers and in some billboards along the highways. The policy of the Cuban state continued to be to reduce the social incidence of this type of message upon daily life.
Another consequence of the economic crisis was the loss of urban media for graphics. The number of billboards decreased considerably, and the so-called «ICAIC umbrellas» –novel metal structures holding eight movie posters at a time that had been placed in tens of places in the capital– gradually deteriorated and were finally removed in recent years.
The billboards of political propaganda abandoned the role of dynamizer of the urban environment they once had. In this period their graphics was poor, with excessive emphasis in discoursive texts and the not very original repetition of flags and faces of heroes and leaders. The political poster, in turn, almost disappeared.
In contrast to the above, a media phenomenon occurred at the opening of the decade that emerged from another angle of the country’s political structure: the campaigns of the Young Communists’ Union, designed by a team of young professionals with the collaboration of students from ISDI. This organization did not grant a preferential role to the poster in its mobilizing purposes. It found support in other media (T-shirts, head ribbons, stickers, wall posters and city walls), and appealed to the visualization of their contents through the typography rather than through icons. Although weaknesses may be pointed out in the quality of the visualization, those designs must be credited with great efficacy in supporting the proselytizing purposes for which they were created.
In the fields of tourism and the pharmaceutical industry there was an intense creation of corporate identity manuals. A valuable know-how was accumulated that later extended to other fields. Two of the first and foremost manuals were designed at ONDI for the Finlay Institute and Dalmer S.A. between 1991 and 1993. Some years later the subject of the systemic regulation of the identity of institutions seemed to be an established knowledge in our circles, with relatively high qualities in the projects that were created in those days and up to the present.
Another type of project that developed considerably was the design of signaling systems and exhibition spaces. The former being linked particularly to service premises or scientific and health centers and the latter to trade fairs, they make use of international standards with professionalism, adapting them to the individual clients, users and environments. Several designers have specialized in these topics, for which they have given evidence of possessing a useful wide profile formation.
The collapse of the graphic industry left behind a remarkable technological aging, the loss of experiences accumulated during decades and a frequent lack of control of the end quality of prints. This became noticeable also in the publishing houses. The last decade of the century saw how many of the graphic profiles of the book collections gradually disappeared and others were simply discontinued. The «illustrated» covers in simplistic fashion abounded, with neither conceptual support nor typographic rigor.
Following the recovery of the national printing capacities in recent years (still more in quantitative than in qualitative terms), a higher quality continues to be obtained in the average when printing abroad than when printing in the country, while on the other hand some publishing houses have had improvements in the general concept and image of their books. Such is the case of Ediciones Boloña, Ediciones Unión and Fondo Editorial Casa. Those same three publishing houses (City Historian’s Office, UNEAC and Casa de las Américas) publish some of the best designed magazines in Cuba today, of which we can mention Opus Habana and La Gaceta de Cuba as examples.
In 1998 the Cuban Book Institute created the National Prize for Book Design, which is granted to the work of a lifetime, first acknowledgement of this kind for designers in the country. That year Eladio Rivadulla received the Prize. He was followed by Roberto Casanueva, Héctor Villaverde, Rafael Morante, Francisco Masvidal, Artemio Iglesias, Alfredo Montoto, Carlos Rubido and Rolando de Oraá. In turn, ONDI has been regularly celebrating its annual «Design Meetings» and created the ONDI Design Prizes, which include acknowledgements in the information design category. In the academic circles there also appeared an international annual event, «Forma» with ISDI as host. Another relevant award in the Cuban design community has been since 1998 the prize «Espacio» presented by the Cuban Association of Social Communicators, an entity founded in 1991.
In 1992, some of the most outstanding designers got together and founded the Comité Prográfica Cubana, a non-governmental, non-profit organization dedicated to promote design as creative activity of a wide cultural content. The first committee was made up by René Azcuy (as President), Héctor Villaverde (Secretary), Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, Alfredo Rostgaard, Antonio Pérez Ñiko, Faustino Pérez, Umberto Peña, Raúl Martínez, Esteban Ayala and Santiago Armada Chago. Prográfica joined the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA) in 1994 and hosted the regional meeting for Latin America of the organization during the International Week of Graphic Design in 2001.
The most renovating graphics of these years has emerged from the classrooms of ISDI, both in academic projects and in the results obtained by the graduates in their respective fields of professional work. A list of academic projects of recent years in the specialty of Information Design (recently renamed Design of Visual Communication) significant for their economic or social scope should not exclude the following: Signaling System of Finlay Institute (graduate Roberto Chávez, 1992); Visual Identity of the Cuban Post (students Julieta Mariño and Carlos Santos, 1996), Identity and Signalization of the 14th World Festival of Youth and Students (Omar López, 1997), Redesign of newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Jorge Méndez y Marcel Tojo, 2006), and educational multimedia (several authors and years).
The irruption of the new designers begins to show likewise in a different aesthetics, which on one hand corresponds to digital technology and on the other hand to their training in the conceptualization of design, i.e., a methodological preparation for the development of the project. Some aesthetic-expressive characteristics of this generation are the uninhibited use of appropriation and quotation, a take-off with regard to their predecessors in the dominion of typography as visual expression of the word, and a trend to the visual game and humor. It has not been a generation with many opportunities to design posters, a piece of communication that seems to have lost usefulness for many officials, entrepreneurs and cultural promoters particularly when compared with the apparently absolute efficacy of television. In spite of it and of the material shortages, a new poster production has been emerging which, modest and with its own ways, seems to want to be the follower of the one that preceded it.
The computer was incorporated –not without certain traumas in the initial moments– as indispensable tool for the designer of these times. At first, the change that it evidently produced in the visual quality of the messages –sometimes for evil; in the long run and mainly for good– was subject of intense debates. Today it is part of the academic training of the new designers, it has expanded to all spaces and territories of design, and the system of creation, reproduction and dissemination of the messages of visual communication in Cuba is already unthinkable without digital technology.
A remarkable development has been experienced in the «screen» designs, i.e., web sites and multimedia. The multidisciplinary integration and the growing demand both in the promotional-commercial and in the instructive-educational fields have produced some high level results, and in general it is a sphere of graphic communication linked to the interactive virtual nature with a vast and surely still not too explored field ahead.
Since the end of the decade there has been a continued migration of young graphic designers. Several of the old masters or members of the intermediate generation also migrated in this period. The economic unsteadiness, the inconsistency of the new generation of designers and the resistance that graphic design has had to face in order to demonstrate its possibilities have caused the maintenance of a questioning on the future evolution. However, the country’s situation has improved in certain aspects and design again has found some sense of usefulness, allowing certain optimism to be perceived as to the possible recovery of Cuban graphic design.

Bibliography
- Bermúdez, J., (2000). La imagen constante. El cartel cubano del siglo xx. Letras Cubanas: La Habana.
- Cushing, L., (2003). ¡Revolución! Cuban Poster Art. Chronicle Books: San Francisco.
- Veigas, J., (1978). «El cartel cubano» en Revolución y Cultura: La Habana, No. 71.