Vietnam
SAIGON - INTERNATIONAL WEEK OF SOLIDARITY WITH VIET-NAM (March 13-19), 1970
Between the 1960s and 1990s, more than fifty designers worked at OSPAAAL. 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. This poster was made during the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, allied with the U.S.A. (known as the ‘Vietnam War’ and ‘War Against the Americans to Save the Nation’). René Mederos’ design repeats the word ‘Saigon’ (now Ho Chi Minh City). Behind the letters, the flag of the U.S.A. transitions into the flag of the group known as the ‘Việt Cộng’.
FOR A VIETNAM TEN TIMES MORE BEAUTIFUL, 1980
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. President Hồ Chí Minh promised that a country “ten times more beautiful” would be rebuilt after the destruction caused by the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, allied with the U.S.A. (known as the ‘Vietnam War’ and ‘War Against the Americans to Save the Nation’).. This posthumous portrait of the leader pictures Vietnamese citizens in the socialist realist style used in propaganda posters from the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China.
Content warning: weaponry
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”
