Protest Posters

Protest posters brings together more than three hundred works by around thirty artists. The images express a growing discontent with a government that has remained in power for more than six decades and has been reluctant to undertake changes. The book is a response to the international projection of an efficient political propaganda apparatus implemented by a regime that continues to describe itself as "revolutionary" and to present itself as the herald of the most humanitarian and progressive social causes on the planet. It is also a reaction to the indoctrination to which the Cuban people have been subjected for more than half a century.

The title alludes to the book The Art of Revolution (1971), which included an introductory text by Susan Sontag and was dedicated to the graphic design that emerged in Cuba during the 1960s. The title also contains references to the well-known poster Canción protesta (1967), created by the Cuban graphic designer Alfredo Rostgaard. The continuities between the graphic design published by government institutions during the first decades of the Revolution and the oppositional posters of the digital era are striking.

Protest posters emerged because of the absence of a public space. The artist Luis Trápaga Brito opened an unauthorized project, a house gallery he called El Círculo, which he ran together with activist Lía Villares. Cultural authorities and the country's intelligence services began exerting strong pressure to prevent any artistic event from taking place in the gallery due to the socially critical content of the works exhibited there.

Due to the difficulties of exhibiting the artworks, Trápaga and the art critic Ernesto Menéndez-Conde, based in New York, conceived the idea of producing a book on this antipropaganda art -often created from within Cuba- which has been published mostly on social media and remains censored in the country.