Editorial Letras Cubanas (cover design: unknown), "Carteles Cubanos / Cuban Posters,” 1978. Offset print, portfolio book.

"Carteles Cubanos" represents Editorial Letras Cubanas's ambitious effort to document and theorize Cuban revolutionary poster art as a distinct graphic language born from the collision of avant-garde aesthetics and mass political mobilization. The portfolio's striking red cover—a single bold field of color suggesting both revolutionary fervor and the poster form's directional urgency—contains multilingual essays positioning Cuban posters within international design discourse. The introductory text defines the poster as a selected image transformed through printing into a mass-distributed visual object determined by the interests of production means' owners, tracing how Cuban posters shed commercial and political demagoguery after 1959 to inherit the revolutionary cultural legacy while incorporating capitalist counter-ideas and technical developments from preceding bourgeois pseudo-republic propaganda. The essay chronicles Cuban poster evolution from 1959 experiments through 1962's high degree of stylistic identification and efficiency, arriving at 1967's flourishing of currents and tendencies that added great originality and richness to political poster assumptions. By 1978, Cuban posters had deepened their diffusive purposes and formal questioning toward scientifically directed propaganda capable of situating itself at the ongoing Revolution's economic and social ascent level. The text emphasizes posters' multifaceted agitational function encompassing political, ideological, cultural, scientific-technical, moral, and aesthetic education. The chronological selection showcases calls for homeland defense, popular campaigns, cultural and educational development—demonstrating the intimate connection between poster and revolutionary process across all stages and manifestations. The portfolio documents work by the Design and Text Workshop of the Revolutionary Orientation Department (DOR) of the Communist Party Central Committee, cinematographic posters of exceptional quality, cultural theme posters, and OSPAAAL's magnificent achievements in solidarity with Asian, African, and Latin American peoples. This publication asserts that only a Revolution can achieve such comprehensive poster conception, observing how Cuban poster art became one of the greatest artistic achievements of the First Socialist Revolution of the American Continent, liberating all creative and expansive potentials of this important mass medium.