Tricontinental Conference

CREATE TWO, THREE...MANY VIET-NAMS, THAT IS THE WATCHWORD, 1967

Between the 1960s and 1990s, more than fifty designers worked at OSPAAAL (the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America). Based in Cuba, they made magazines and posters that were sent around the world. Their aim was to promote radical political ideas. Many of their posters celebrate socialist revolutions and liberation movements from the Global South. The first edition of OSPAAAL’s Tricontinental magazine was a special supplement dedicated to Che Guevara’s Message to the Tricontinental. His manifesto presented Vietnamese Communists opposing U.S. military forces in Vietnam as a model for patriotic resistance. It contained the only poster of the guerrilla leader made during his lifetime – Guevara was killed in Bolivia six months after its issue. OSPAAAL’s designers often used repetition of photographic as a way to create bold illustrations with limited resources. The studio’s first art director Alfredo Rostgaard said that “from the need to solve our material problems, we began to discover new forms”