EL DISENO PERFECTO: A FACT-FINDING EXPEDITION TO CUBA

I am not sure about what I was looking for when I went to Cuba.
Knowing what I knew about the history of the Cuban poster, I think I
was hoping for this kind of utopian socialist society, where designer
was regarded as the highest of all professions. The purveyor of
propaganda. Now, keep in mind, Cubans refer to all types of advertising
as "propaganda", forsaking the usual Spanish translation "publicidad",
which I think is really great, for why beat around the bush?
I
had seen the posters at the height of Cuban poster design in the late
1960s. Posters by such design icons as Nico, Alfredo Rostgaard, Rene
Mederos, Raul Mart nez, Elena Serrano, Felix Beltran, et al. These were
heroes of mine for the incredibly striking imagery they had turned out
over and over, with limited resources due to crushing poverty, thanks
in no small part to the US blockade. Then, suddenly, after the late
1970s - nothing. No more beautiful posters touting the sanctity and
nobility of the Revolucion. No more posters extolling the virtues of
the goal of a 10 million ton sugar cane harvest. What happened? I felt
that there was an interesting parallel to Canadian graphic design to be
explored here, in that I feel Canadian design seemed to reach its
zenith in the late 1960s and has, for the most part, fallen off ever
since.
Before leaving for Havana, I had been in touch with
a couple of contacts there and I tried to make contact with these
designers on the first day. Unfortunately, the types of luxuries in
terms of conducting business that we take for granted in Canada, are
sometimes non-existent in Cuba. For example, on the first day I could
not find a working telephone. Apparently, due to hurricane damage and
telephone company inefficiencies, the lines are often out of service. I
decided to try to walk to my colleague Hector Villaverde's office, and
attempt to call him along the way. Taking photos of signage and murals,
being a pasty shade of Winnipeg white, and wearing shorts (to Habaneros
it was an icy +28sC) proceeded to make me stick out like a sore thumb,
and I was hit from all sides by tour guides of convenience, prostitutes
and general hustlers. The first payphone I tried sucked the $10 USD
from my phone card then went dead. Plus, I could not shake this
slippery tour guide/sudden best friend named Luis, no matter how
incredibly rude I became, so I hopped into a cab and headed back to my
casa particulare and peace.
Other days turned out to be
much more fruitful. I made contact with Hector, and he gave me the lay
of the graphic design landscape in Havana. We showed each other samples
of our work, and he toured me around Habana Vieja. Hector is the
President of Prografica, the local graphic design resource
organization, and as such, he was able to set up a group meeting with a
few local designers that Friday. As well, he was able to arrange for me
to meet Daniel Cruz, a professor of typography at the Instituto
Superior de Diseno Industrial (ISDI) the next day.
I met Mr
Cruz for a drink at my casa particulare, and we talked about design in
Cuba at great length. He spoke of the need for Cuban designers to be
all things - photographer, writer, illustrator - as well as designer,
out of sheer necessity. He talked about the stringent requirements to
get into ISDI - almost 1,000 students apply, all are tested, then
finally, 100 are eventually chosen for study. Though the rate of
attrition is incredibly high, it also seems to be incredibly effective
in terms of producing quality students. When I visited ISDI the next
day, I was astonished by the work that I saw. The students were
producing work - without the benefit of computers - that, quite
frankly, made me feel like I had no business calling myself a
professional. I have never seen student work so intelligent, so clean,
or so perfect. Daniel had shown me some first year work, and sort of
sloughed it off, saying "Oh this is just first year, they don't know
how to make a poster yet", but they were beautiful pieces, filled with
humour, visual puns, incredible illustration and a wonderful sense of
typography.
A great exercise the design students partake
of, is one in which they form student groups within which they will
work on collaborative art projects. One of the requirements of the
exercise is to create a banner for the group, and I happened to see one
of these for a group called "kamaleon". With eight students in
kamaleon, each student took a letter of the name and based a single
poster around it. Together they form a banner - separately, they are
these great individual art pieces.
The school seemed really
well rounded (quotes by great figures of literature on one blackboard,
mathematical equations on another), however, I found it interesting
that the industrial design student projects all had a military
function. I was informed that there is no product industry in Cuba,
therefore industrial designers work on projects that prepare for the
"American invasion that will never come". Because of this fact,
industrial designers, when they graduate, are forced to find work as
graphic designers, since there is virtually no work in their field.
Daniel's girlfriend, for example, is a fashion designer by training,
but she must work as a graphic designer, as there is no textile
industry to speak of.
Unfortunately, I met almost no
students, as they were all out at studios doing their practicum,
getting their only experience on a computer. After seeing the hand
drawn work at ISDI, I wondered if the computer would perhaps only serve
to taint their process, as the projects that I had seen were so
perfect. And yet, despite the fact that the school had such limited
resources, that the conditions could be described as squalid (the
building itself was in a state of serious disrepair), that simple
materials are in such short supply, part of me wanted to leave my job
and come down to Cuba and go to school to learn how to design again.
The
day after visiting ISDI, I went back to Prografica for a meeting with
some local designers. We showed each other work and then followed that
with an informal discussion. They were most interested in knowing about
the way we work in Canada, about business, and about the fact that my
three person studio was the norm for a small studio in Canada. For the
most part, all of these designers worked at home alone as freelancers.
Their other option would be to work for a government department
somewhere on an in-house team, such as the Cuban Tourism Department.
These sorts of jobs, however, are frowned upon by most designers as
being stifling and uncreative. This interested me, as even though these
jobs may be more lucrative, the designers that I met were more
interested in the creative freedom their freelance situations afforded
them.
My discussion at Prografica that day, and touring
ISDI the previous day, had answered the questions I had set out with.
What had happened to all the great Cuban design of years past? Nothing
- it has remained, as vital and compelling as ever, and the future,
from the looks of the student work, seems to be Cuba's. The only
difference between the situation now and the late 60's, is that the
government does not sponsor poster production in the way it used to.
The government graphic design money now all goes into the tourism
industry, Cuba's biggest business, and as such, the really good design
rarely breaks away from Cuba's shores.
An interesting part
of the Prografica discussion centred around film posters, and the
differences between the ones produced by our cultures. They asked if I
felt a poster with a picture of Mel Gibson on it (ours) was better than
a poster which told the story through illustration (theirs). I told
them that it was the feeling, at least for myself and my friends, that
in recent years film posters have become a blight on our visual
landscape, and often will simply feature a photo of the star, banking
on his/her popularity to sell the film. And though this situation is
slowly improving, I told them they were still simply light years ahead
of us in this respect. Their film posters are artful, they tell a story
in a second, providing one with a complete notion of what the film is
about. The designers are not necessarily forced to produce these out of
necessity, because they have no photos of the star to work with, but
most often it is simply because that what the Cuban populace has come
to expect from a film poster. The designers I met with recommended that
I see the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos
(ICAIC) lobby for a really good taste of Cuban film poster design, as
the walls and ceiling are lined with the some of the best. I did just
that and I came away thinking that there is such a valuable lesson to
be learned from Cuban poster design. I think that if production studios
would give designers a chance, that if they would simply provide them
with a copy of the film and the directions: "Tell the story in a
poster", the results would be so much bolder and intelligent than
anything we have recently seen. They should rely on the ability of the
public to be able to read Mel Gibson's name, and not have to use a
portrait of him to sell the film to us. Imagine how artful posters such
as that could beautify our landscape rather than detracting from it?
This
leads me to the biggest lesson learned during my time in Havana, which
was that even thought the city was in a state of serious, serious decay
(it has been compared to London during the blitz, and justifiably so),
the visual landscape is not harmed further by the addition of loads of
bad advertising, hideous billboards, and a complete overload of
corporate imagery. In fact, the landscape is only beautified by the
addition of the work of Cuba's incredibly talented designers. I feel,
that in terms of the corporate images and the mediocre cookie-cutter
design that we are bombarded with daily, we have lost something. We
have become caught up in a connection to things, but not things that
mean something. A lot of our design is just selling purely for the
purposes of consumption and not actually for the public good. It was
inspiring to see designers who make on average around $15 US a month
eschewing corporate jobs in favour of working for the small art
galleries, the tiny publishing houses.
The price that we
pay to live in our economy is that we have lost our connections to art,
to culture, to things that will matter in the long run. It is
unfortunately a price that is also exacted in the work of our students.
All too often I see the work of students coming out of our schools (and
personally, I was no exception) as being far too trendy, owing more to
videos and Nike commercials than to the work of the past masters of our
profession. There does not seem to be the knowledge of design history,
nor the urgency or the vitality in the work in North America that is
possessed by the students at ISDI. There is a quote I once heard
attributed to Czech president Vaclav Havel, back when he was a
dissident playwright that is analogous to this situation. He was
pointing out the difference between life in the United States and the
struggles of people under communist rule in Czechoslovakia, when he
said "Over there, everything goes and nothing matters. Over here,
nothing goes and everything matters.". I think this statement
appropriately illustrates the problems facing Cuban and Canadian
designers. The question is, what will we do to ensure that in the
future, everything that goes, matters?
Background
In November of 2001, the partners of the Winnipeg based graphic design
studio neuhaus, Callum Beattie and Darren Stebeleski, were offered an
opportunity courtesy of Wayne Baerwaldt, then curator of Plug In
Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg. Mr Baerwaldt and a group of
Canadians involved in the arts were travelling to Havana, Cuba as a
cultural exchange delegation in January of 2002. The possibility of
including a designer as part of the group was brought up, and due to
neuhaus' love of Cuban graphic design, the offer was quickly accepted.
It was looked upon as a fact finding mission, with its goal being to
investigate the current state of affairs in Cuban graphic design. The
delegation, in addition to Mr Baerwaldt and Mr Stebeleski, included
such notable figures as: Noam Gonick, filmmaker; Laura Michalchyshyn,
Senior Vice President of Dramatic Programming, Alliance Atlantis; Rick
Gilbert, a production designer in the Toronto film industry; and David
McIntosh, an academic specializing in Latin America, film and
economics, and who is also the programmer of the Hot Docs documentary
film festival in Toronto.
Darren Stebeleski graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Art Graphic Design program with a BFA (Honours). Upon graduation, Darren worked in graphic design in Calgary, Alberta for 9 months before returning to Winnipeg. After returning, he worked at an advertising agency for 3 years before ultimately co-founding neuhaus with Callum Beattie in 2000.