Cuban Comics in the Castro Era

Caridad Blanco de la Cruz

Caridad Blanco is a Cuban writer, artist, curator, and an expert in Cuban humor and historietas/comics. She was born in 1961 in Havana, Cuba, and earned a Bachelor's degree in Art History from the University of Havana in 1984 and a Master's degree in Art History in 2002. She is active in the art world in Havana being both an art curator and an adjunct at the University of Havana. She has published many exhibition catalogs and in the last year she has published a book of Santiago Armada's work, called Salomon, and Other Narrations: A Decade of Independent Animation, and has also published extensively on Cuban Historietas for the past 20 years. She has won numerous awards throughout her career for her exhibition work including the Premio de la UNEAC y la Fundación Peter Ludwig de Cuba and the Premio Crítica de Artes “Guy Pérez de Cisneros” Premio Nacional de Curaduría.

The collection’s namesake, Caridad Blanco de la Cruz, is a curator at the Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales (Center for the Development of the Visual Arts) in Havana. Comic books and graphic art and humor are a lifelong passion. She is a graphic art scholar, has published articles and books on the topic, and created numerous exhibitions spotlighting Cuban comic book artists in Cuba and in Europe. Her most recent book, published in April 2019, is Los flujos de la imagen: Una década de animación independiente en Cuba (2003–2013). Blanco has collected comic books throughout her life, resulting in a collection carefully curated to reflect the most important themes, artists, characters, publishers, and newspaper inserts of the last sixty years. One of her lifelong goals has been to elevate graphic humor in Cuba to the status of a fine art, worthy of serious consideration in the art world and the scholarly universe. This collection will be a treasure trove for scholars of literature, art, public relations, history, political science, African diaspora studies, Latin American studies, and much more.

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