The Cuban Government Brought New Life to Hollywood Movies With These Vivid Posters

[Judi Lynn]

A groovy poster for a stagy movie of a classic 19th-century novel: from a new show of Cuban artworks. (Courtesy of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics)


The U.S. embargo didn’t keep Cubans from watching movies they loved

By Amy Crawford
Smithsonian Magazine
July 2017

After the 1959 revolution, many Cuban communities were cut off from one another, without radio, television or electricity. But if there was one thing that could bring the island nation together, it was Hollywood movies.

“Cubans have a real love affair with U.S. film,” says Carol Wells, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, in Culver City, California.

It’s a love that’s evident in a new exhibition of Cuban posters for American movies, which opens August 20 at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and runs through January 7. Curated by Wells and drawing from the center’s collection, the show highlights 50 years’ of exuberant silkscreens, created by the island nation’s top graphic designers as part of a program sponsored by the Cuban Institute of Art and Film Industry (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, commonly known as the ICAIC).

The revolutionary government created the ICAIC in March 1959, less than three months after emerging victorious from a hard-fought guerrilla war. Hollywood movies had long been popular in Havana, but the new agency was tasked with bringing cinema to the people, many of whom lived in remote and historically disenfranchised communities where news of the revolution had yet to arrive. The mission would require some creativity.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/cuban-government-new-life-hollywood-movies-posters-180963670/#mmSIAEmCk6p6RchK.99

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