Cuban Comics in the Castro Era
Graphic humor developed in Cuba, as in much of the West, with newspaper strips and satirical political cartoons, starting in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps the first subversive and political caricature to have appeared in Cuba was drawn in 1848 when Cirilio Villaverde lambasted the count of Pozos Dulces.A strong culture of graphic art also developed in the form of trading cards, beginning with tobacco cards, and expanding in the twentieth century to collectible cards included with different food products. This tradition continued through the revolution and still remained popular for Cuban children through the end of the twentieth century. Comic books began appearing in Cuba in the early twentieth century, but were primarily Spanish-language translations of Disney and superhero comics popular in the United States at the time. With the triumph of Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, comic books abruptly found a new purpose and strong official support.
As the new government developed revolutionary ideals, graphic art, along with other popular art forms, was quickly put to the service of building a revolutionary nationalist consciousness. This coincided with a movement throughout Latin America focused on distinguishing national cultures and identities from those of the United States. In Cuba, US comics were quickly replaced by Cuban comics, written and drawn by Cuban artists, with uniquely Cuban themes.
Stories took a swift revolutionary stance, urging readers to work to become the new socialist man, an identity characterized by devotion to work, individual contribution, and involvement in collective efforts. Comics told stories of the heroes of the revolution and the Cuban Independence movement, exemplified by the most popular comic book character in Cuba, Elpidio Valdés, a colonel with the peasant Mambi army fighting for liberation from Spain in the 1890s. Alongside these larger-than-life hero characters, stories focused on ordinary Cuban citizens, each doing their part to improve the quality of life for themselves and their neighbors. Protagonists are humble, don’t lie to their family or friends, they take care of themselves physically and emotionally, and always contribute to community projects. When characters make decisions counter to the revolutionary ideal, everyone comes together to get them back on track. Comics without overtly political messages at the least featured public service announcements with similar messages sprinkled among the stories. A common theme of Cuban comics is anti-imperialism.Graphic humor developed in Cuba, as in much of the West, with newspaper strips and satirical political cartoons, starting in the late nineteenth century. A strong culture of graphic art also developed in the form of trading cards, beginning with tobacco cards, and expanding in the twentieth century to collectible cards included with different food products. This tradition continued through the revolution and still remained popular for Cuban children through the end of the twentieth century. Comic books began appearing in Cuba in the early twentieth century, but were primarily Spanish-language translations of Disney and superhero comics popular in the United States at the time. With the triumph of Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, comic books abruptly found a new purpose and strong official support.
As the new government developed revolutionary ideals, graphic art, along with other popular art forms, was quickly put to the service of building a revolutionary nationalist consciousness. This coincided with a movement throughout Latin America focused on distinguishing national cultures and identities from those of the United States. In Cuba, US comics were quickly replaced by Cuban comics, written and drawn by Cuban artists, with uniquely Cuban themes.
In the United States, the comic book medium first became popular in the 1930s after the iconic Superman exploded onto the scene in Action Comics in 1938. In the 1940s, after World War II, the American superhero became a mainstay in popular art and culture and has been so ever since.As the Cuban Revolution raged on during the 1950s, a few comic strips stood by the side of rebel leader Fidel Castro or otherwise served his purposes. One of the most important anti-Batista strips was Pucho y Sus Perrerías, by Marcos Behemaras and Virgilio Martínez Gaínza, published in the clandestine political magazine Mella (1955-59). After 1959, Mella and Revolución published comic strips and weekly comics supplements. Ediciones en Colores started four monthly comics magazines, while Palante and Pionero humor magazines opened the way for many cartoonists to develop their craft. After 1965, political and strip cartoons appeared in the two main dailies that emerged out of the early revolutionary years, Granma and Juventud Rebelde. They were joined by various humor and specialized magazines, including Dedeté (created in 1979), which along with Palante has survived into the twenty-first century. The Latin American economic downturn of the early 1990s particularly impacted Cuba, severely hurting newspaper publishing and decimating comics production in the island into the new millennium.
literacy brigades, an initiative of Che Guevara that reduced the rates of illiteracy from 60% in Cuba of Batista in 1959 to 2% on December 22, 1961, when Cuba has been declared a territory free of illiteracy in America.
The popularity of the comic book genre in Cuba occurred in the 1960s, during the same period that the revolution remade the country of Cuba. This idea was not lost on the new Cuban government which increasingly utilized comics as a means to educate the populous about the principles of the new Castro revolution. While children were a primary target of indoctrination, these comics also appealed to many adults.
What it is clear is the importance henceforth of words such as orientation, education
and information in relation to culture. Fidel Castro stressed the idea of orientation clearly
in his Palabras: ‘The Revolution and the Revolutionary Government have a duty to have a
highly qualified agency which stimulates, encourages, develops, and orients – yes,
orients – that creative spirit’ (Castro 1961c). It is within that framework I suggest to
approach the use made of mass media (radio, television, cinema, but also comics) by the
revolutionary government, which from its earliest measures employed them effectively to
build a revolutionary consciousness and mobilize the masses, not to mention eliminating a
potential danger by controlling the whole media industry. Again, Castro in his Palabras
acknowledged the importance of mass media with respect to the education of the people:
Among manifestations of an intellectual or artistic type, there are some which are
more important with respect to the education of the people or the ideological
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instruction of the people than other kinds of artistic manifestations. I do not
believe that anyone would dispute the fact that the cinema and television are one of
these basic and very important media. (Castro 1961c)
At the same time as this reorganization of all the media took place from 1959 to May 1960, certain media (comics especially) were heavily criticized as imperialist ideological tools to penetrate the minds of children and youth, as Blas Roca, director of the Communists’ newspaper Noticias de Hoy, stated in December 1963 (Pogolotti 2007: 229). Comics had been univocally – that is a product and consequence of bourgeois societies – linked to foreign (and especially American) artistic manifestations as proof of their decadent bourgeois character, which praised mass culture in, as it was perceived, a pernicious levelling effect for society. This suspicion towards (foreign) comics had been constructed and fomented during the 1960s by Cuban newspapers, policy makers and political figures alike. Fidel Castro, in the closing speech of the Revolutionary Youth Students’ Congress in March 1961, stressed US cultural penetration in Cuba: ‘In the past, we read only Yankee American magazines, Yankee books, Yankee news agency reports, Yankee papers, Yankee comics’ (Castro 1961a). Months after Castro’s speech, in October 1961, an article in Revolucio´n (figure 1) entitled ‘Mun˜equitos: opio preparado por la USIS’ (Comics: opium prepared by the USIS) stressed the use of comics by imperialism to discipline the masses. In this article comics were described as ‘one of imperialism’s preferred opiums to stultify its own people and whoever might be willing to participate. Comic strips tend to reproduce a biased state of opinion in favour of the Yankee social or political point of view’ (Revolucio´n 1961: 8).
This collection, acquired from artist and curator Caridad Blanco, is a combination of stand-alone comics and newspaper supplements consisting of over 700 pieces ranging from 1937 to 2018. There are examples of important and relatively unique materials from Cuban comic history from the 1930's on, though the majority of the materials are from post-revolution Cuba. Some of the more frequent and well-known titles include ¡Aventuras!, Bijirita, C-Línea, Zunzún, Dedeté, Mella, Muñe, Pionero, and Pásalo.
