CUBAN GRAPHIC DESIGN: A RELAY RACE
Reynaldo González

In this brief text I appeal to general statements without identifying periods, enterprises and personalities that have been very well described in an article sharing these pages. I choose to evocate the many and varied reasons that turned Havana’s streets and façades –and to a lesser but significant extent some of Cuba’s main cities– into spaces where already in very early times graphic arts and propaganda reached a development that gradually became impetuous. We can consider that they looked out into the streets once the interiors had been conquered: from everything that embellished the salon and moved in the hands to the conquest of the outside, from the trademarks created by German and French engravers who in the 19th century came to satisfy demands of bourgeois enslavers eager to boast of their possessions and industrial vanguard position –with the consequent setting up of printing machines for the exquisiteness of cigar bands and boxes– to newspapers that followed foreign guidelines and surmounted the initial lists of port arrivals and shipments, plain factual graphic chronicles. A sense of commercial claim, of illustrated information, of promotion for competence thus began to emerge, which resulted in group education, a usage that compelled the pupil and alerted taste.

From those parts of the world with styles praised in the consumers’ greedy retina, Cuba –Spain’s adored child and a sort of coveted bride of the United States– received a sense of entrepreneurship along with their technical advances, and developed them with a priority that excelled in some aspects the peninsular metropolis and surrounding Caribbean and Central American countries. This was already taking place in the second half of the 19th century in the evolution of packaging and the unquestionable refinement of the press. The arrival of Republican life, though late with regard to the countries in the hemisphere, detonated the boom of that propaganda initially linked to business but also to entertainment, the information on enriching environmental satisfactions such as fashions and the lines of the carriages in which the powerful moved in the cities. Otherwise, what other intention could there have been in the adornments of the coachmen, their showy jackets and high hats, the buggies themselves, the decorated sun blinds that favored transit along the sunny city arteries and the advertisements in shop façades and apparently useless walls? Undoubtedly, the preference for certain typographies enlarged by sign painters became evident there, details that embellished the space with plenty of humor to attract passers-by. When we observe old photos of Havana we are struck by those forms of propaganda, true gigantic reproductions of a decidedly competitive nature. The Cuban capital profited from both its geographical location and the fact that from the very beginning it was a meeting point and cultural crossing toward an unstoppable cosmopolitanism. From that moment on the commercial aspect of graphic design did not come to a halt.

Life in the Republican period had a defining expression in the handling of printed propaganda, those paid newspaper ads where the taste of entrepreneurs who tried to distinguish themselves stood out, turning those pages into a collection of samples of pretensions and attempts to be outstanding. They went from the smallest engravings to signs with large types explaining the nature of the proposals. What we would call «logotypes» emerged from those claims, won space when seeking the wall already as distinctive seal with the multiplication of the image enlarged «by the perpendicular line». The dentist used a set of teeth, the shoemaker a shoe, the oculist a pair of eyeglasses, the tailor a pinned-up manikin and even the funeral parlor an elegant hearse. Some type families gained preference among a still reduced assortment when engravers, xylographers or creators of silkscreen prints increased the scanty list of images, introduced schools and styles and contributed to improve tastes.

If the economic crises diminished, the powerful or medium-sized traders took advantage of the situation to add distinguished elements to the shop windows and exhibit imports and locally made garments. There they also included announcements of public events as a note of distinction: the arrival of a circus, the nomadic vaudeville, the great opera company, the seduction of the cinema, which imposed itself with the enlargements of its «views» and the insistence in certain producers and artists. All that was «well seen», it had a place in the group imagery but nothing could have been possible without the seduction of the advertisements, the printed propaganda, the dedication of hand reproducers and printers. The first half of the 20th century saw an unequal development of both propaganda and information according to either United States or European schools until peculiar forms developed, nourished by the humor and nature of the Island. It happened in the theater and in the early attempts of a national cinema, always agonic but enthusiastic, ready to overcome the successive failures in a state of intermittent welfare and faintness. That propaganda dependent of upward and downward cycles, of harvest season and «dead season», of fat years and lean years linked itself to the economic and political throbbing, expressed or condemned it, and turned satire into an inseparable element while it developed forms of survival, crafts and specialties. The typographers’ guild was not in the least despicable in Cuban social life, an evidence of the needs it covered and of the mobility to which it contributed in an effervescent, awaken conglomerate that created and stimulated by itself both true and invented needs in an enlightening atmosphere.

No true editorial production existed in those days –with exceptions– but there were indeed magazines and journals, both serious and humoristic, a choice of seductions for the high and refined classes, with huge newspapers representing interests of multinationals or of their own in a network that was hard to penetrate. All those who appeared in them added to their craft a talent with a large component of public relations, of diplomacy, of weightless game, as if to flee from accidents proper of dependence and endemic underdevelopment. The middle and low classes found compensation in low cost weekly and monthly issues –some with information undreamed of in other points of the hemisphere– and in the love stories contained in tiny magazines handed out free in drugstores when purchasing analgesics or digestion salts. Among them I recall the peculiar Cubamena, handbook and enjoyment, useful advice and roguish wit seasoned with sardonic humor and the urge to distribute among the poor, who were considered «those who buy the most», a minor production to create illusions as mitigation without healing. That propaganda network of plural and interwoven channels went from the radio to the printed letter, in constant creation of slogans and jingles; written, read and sung advertisements imposed by a seductive figure, a peculiar typography and the «hooking» phrase that appealed to ineluctable needs but also to imperative whimsies. And design profited from it all.

The arrival of television put together images, sounds and somewhat roguish courtesies and politics in its crudest and most direct expression. By that time, a kind of high-sounding propaganda predominated, which did not appeal to persuasion but to sensationalism. There remained traces of a refinement slightly invaded by bad taste that looked over the shoulder with offended but impotent dignity. It must be said that efficiency was also required in not too selective circles, something already gained by the practitioners of the daily information ritual and so metabolized that it remained unnoticed, interiorized in the same manner in which addiction operates «from inside» and asks for «more of the same» in an automatic demand. The majority of the population was trapped in the strings of political or sentimental manipulation, the incalculable erosion of sentimentality planted in the messages created «for the masses»; both definitions marked by a coarse taste: a candidate was proposed to «the public affair» on elementary grounds similar to a soap opera. The elite took refuge in spaces of doubtful good taste of «beauty», «finery», sophistication understood as refinement, without obtaining an answer and still less an understanding of the phenomena it repeated.

In the midst of that bewildered and bewildering atmosphere, it is undeniable that the propaganda and its attached resource, design, fulfilled their roles with efficient professionalism. Cuba had become a point of reference for printing in Latin America as well as a source of talents. This explains the multiplicity of advertising agencies that included both the soap companies that controlled both radio and television, the covers and inner pages of popular magazines –some with gigantic print-runs that arrived in the capitals of neighboring countries the same day they came out in Havana–, the billboards along the highways and those serving as backdrop to the most spectacular moves in sports stadiums. The presence of designers gained space: an army of beginners was getting ready because among the short-term careers a very profitable one was that of commercial design. Even though there might be artists among them, for the time being no one spoke of art but of business.

The demand expressed in posters that tackled passers-by even in the rustic fans with which they mitigated the persistent heat in the Island created consumer habits, a reckless handling of codes, the assimilation of messages that penetrated the retina and added to popular imagery. When the Revolution arrived, commercial and political propaganda was at its summit but endured far-reaching changes. It had a drastic mutation when advertising turned into ideology and political persuasion, the other «product» that benefited from the already sown. Advertising dessapeared from the radio, television and the press. For those who had launched publicity campaigns and organized preference, consumer and audience surveys it was their turn to participate in the change to be produced by the new contents. As teachers or accomplishers they fulfilled the new tasks and remained in their posts until retirement or death, or left the country because they did not share the new policies or because the earnings were no longer the same. Even in a period that followed the so-called socialist realism of Eastern Europe, its creators used the traditional propaganda formulas with which they had formerly convoked to the ballots or the baseball stadiums. In the end, that «art» did not differ from the imperative and direct form used to sell beer and detergent. It was an aggressive series to the eye and burdensome to good taste. It invaded the spaces of the ancient publicity and its printing systems with strong proletarian arms, raising tools amidst flags to call to a meeting or to the sugarcane harvest. There was a predominance of fretwork in silkscreen, of primary colors and drastic positions to round up an imposed agitation. In truth, it was not new to Cuban posters, which had formerly chosen to present the impact rather than persuasion, but the socialist realistic trend went to extremes with a total absence of nuances.

The new order granted particular importance to education, and as part of it, the teaching of art. A first period included the most contradictory schools, the behaviorism of an allegedly proletarian art and abstract expressionism, which participated of a very risky operation together with the innovators of the first stage, who offered a quiet resistance. An equal number of generations and trends coincided in the art and design scene, with inevitable contaminations. As in music, now enriched by composers and instrumentalists who did not repeat the plain model of the old «ear musicians» because they were trained in excellent conservatories, the cross influence of art and design was perceived in the groups that arrived to the magazine offices, poster workshops and –now with a growth of the printing industry– to the production of books in mass print-runs of cultural interest. The traditional poster was deprived of its historical patterns and faced with new targets when a new poster replaced it with the aim of promoting reading campaigns, film cycles, concerts and ballet seasons, all without the basic commercial purpose. In the midst of those silent battles held in an atmosphere of respect and not of competence, designers were trained with an interest in materializing ideas of both cultural and human improvement. If the previous efficiency in the propaganda had been achieved with imagination and initiatives, graphic design now enjoyed a dazzling boom in quantity and formal innovation. New spheres of influence began to play a role such as the design trends of some European countries that showed more intellectual and complex achievements where they alternated elements of vanguard schools and new readings of the old codes. Now, again but in a flood, the creative sensibility was in a state of tension, it demanded from itself, and the competition of talents gained a different far-reaching effect. The «consumers» were multitudes, they were learning a new enjoyment, they appreciated everything that demanded their standing up. A dialogue was going on between creators and viewers in an unceasingly changing field. A connotative ferment was in fact being experienced.

Books and posters offered novel possibilities of enjoyment. Without the urge to appeal to an easy message, they pressed for intellectual effort and the game of references. They appreciated the surprising, the suggestive, the challenge to understanding and the game of ideas. That line included surprise elements in the Cuban appreciation in the same measure as the circumstances of the commercial blockade imposed by the United States to Cuba and the isolation of Cuba accepted by the Organization of American States. New forms of exchange, new relations and truly unexpected answers in our hemisphere emerged in order to tear down those barriers. The obliged rupture with the former sources of influence and the approach to exogenous concepts and to the formerly established sensibility produced new support. The maintenance of artistic culture, favored like never before, and those exchanges developed the sensibility of both creators and message consumers. What was formerly plain combustion material now deserved a different valuation. In the meantime, since the blockade and its reply have lasted half a century, other habits and consequently other understandings have developed. Today, we Cubans undoubtedly understand some things in a manner that is different to the predominant one in the countries that surround us even if they share similar cultural roots and elements of a procreative crossbreeding, considered an important element in the idiosyncratic orientation.

The ranks of Cuban graphic art have increased in the same measure with both new talents emerged from demanding schools with a plural, more complete training than their predecessors, and already «formed» talents who have contributed their experience. Some artists –but only a few– participated with the ability and ductility required by this work, with the failure of others who transferred their searches, styles and formal concerns as an extension of their work without understanding that graphic art is art, yes, but applied art, with its own grammar dictated by its purposes. At present, after periods of great findings and profound slopes, economic crises that reduced the production of books, magazines and posters and excessive tutelage that impoverished creativeness, Cuban graphic art recomposes itself and searches for new horizons. Its health is in danger due to a persistent draining of talents that competes with the also persistent replacement. It witnesses a dilemma of permanence, essential for the development of methods and crafts, although it is availed of opposite and plural sources, of confrontations that enrich it and prevent the routine reduction of the findings. Cuban design has dodged some storms and has assets such as its golden periods. However, again it is involved in a relay race, which differs from the marathon in that it requires an essential period of sowing to collect future harvests.