Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1945335149 ISBN 13: 9781945335143

Publisher: Common Notions, 2025

Synopsis

A stunning full-color, multilingual exploration of the profound graphic and intellectual legacy of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) for internationalism, solidarity, communication, and art among movements today.

Armed by Design reflects on the intersection of graphic design and political solidarity work in revolutionary Cuba through the lens of the production of OSPAAAL, the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

OSPAAAL developed out of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, a meeting of delegates representing national liberation movements and leftist political parties almost exclusively from the Global South. Based in Havana, OSPAAAL produced nearly five hundred posters, magazines, and books beginning in the late 1960s, with most of their work ceasing by the late 1980s. Until 2019, OSPAAAL was a political organization focused on fighting US imperialism and supporting liberation movements around the world through poster production, regularly produced publications, and a series of books featuring the writings of the intellectual leadership of these movements.

Armed By Design brings together artists and thinkers from around the world whose work has been impacted by the legacy of OSPAAAL. These contributions reflect on impacts of OSPAAAL’s work on regional movements, including in the Arab world and Korea, design iconography, the evolution of tricontinentalism, our present-day.

This full-color multilingual edition includes ten international contemporary political poster-makers, artists, and designers commissioned to produce OSPAAAL-inspired prints in solidarity with today’s movements: Friends of Ibn Firnas (USA), Yuko Tonohira (Japan/USA), Ganzeer (Egypt/USA), Un Mundo Feliz (Spain), Steven Rodriguez (USA), Dignidad Rebelde, Tomie Arai (USA), Sublevarte Colectivo (Mexico), Jamaa Al-Yad (Lebanon/Worldwide), and A3CB (Japan).

About this title

About the Authors

Interference Archive is a community-supported archive of material from social movements around the world, created with a mission to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements. This work manifests in an open stacks archival collection, publications, a study center, and public programs including exhibitions, workshops, talks, and screenings, all of which encourage critical and creative engagement with the rich history of social movements.

Lani Hanna is a PhD Candidate in Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Cruz. Her research looks at community archives as social movement infrastructure across several rapidly changing cities. She has taken part in organizing several exhibitions at Interference Archive, including Armed by Design. Her article Tricontinental’s International Solidarity: Emotion in OSPAAAL as Tactic to Catalyze Support of Revolution (Radical History Review 2020) was part of a special edition about gender and the Cuban Revolution. 

Jen Hoyer is a librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and has volunteered on collections, exhibitions, and education projects at Interference Archive since 2013. Her writing about the intersections of education, archives, and social movement history is available in The Social Movement Archive (Litwin Books, 2021) and What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (Libraries Unlimited, 2022).

Josh MacPhee has been collaboratively making, researching, and collecting political art for over twenty years. In 2011, he cofounded the Interference Archive, a library, exhibition, event, and research space in Brooklyn dedicated to the exploration of social movement culture. He is also a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, and the author/editor of multiple books including Celebrate People's History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution (Feminist Press, 2010 and 2020), An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), and Graphic Liberation: Perspectives on Image Making and Political Movements (Common Notions, 2023). His solo exhibition, We Want Everything, was hosted by the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2022.

Vero Ordaz is a collaborative focused community member.  She weaves her broad life and professional experiences to help bring people together. With a background in American Studies and Labor Studies, she is a higher education administrator and active rank-and-file member of the PSC-CUNY union.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Passafronteras: Notes on Archives, Tricontinental Graphic Action, and Solidarity

André Mesquita

The people are only able to create and develop the liberation movement because they keep their culture alive despite continual and organized repression of their cultural life and because they continue to resist culturally even when their political-military resistance is destroyed.

—Amilcar Cabral, Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle (1972)

In the introduction of each Tricontinental edition, the following warning used to be disseminated: “Partial or total reproduction is freely permitted by the Tricontinental magazine” validating the free and anti-copyright position of ideas and images without commercial interests. Today, OSPAAAL posters are preserved in universities, libraries, public archives, and autonomous spaces, as well as fetishized and capitalized by the art market. If we turn our attention to the amount of graphic and collaborative work, we can see that these artists are producers of “unappropriatable archives,” using here the concept suggested by researchers Fernanda Carvajal and Mabel Tapia. The “unappropriatable” seeks, with its resources and conditions, the production of new meanings, uses, commitments, and imaginations for the archive. Here, the lack of this or that poster or a document can help us to create other lines of thought and disarticulate the notion of a closed archive as property and commodity. We are talking about archives that refuse totality and accumulation but that “alter, from within, the center placed in the owner or in the property itself in order to promote its use value.” The articulation of these revolutionary posters can produce insurgent knowledges and new ways of making politics.

OSPAAAL’s militant publications emerged in a world polarized by the Cold War and the effects of military dictatorships. Their campaigns were developed at a time in which countries in the Southern Cone were creating secret networks of operation with the CIA to support the imprisonment, torture, and murder of political opponents and dissidents, as well as to carry out US military counterinsurgency programs designed to annihilate guerrillas and revolutionary leaders during the Vietnam War.

A 1969 edition of Tricontinental contained a poster designed by Alfredo Rostgaard: a guerrilla Christ carrying a rifle over his shoulder, subverting traditional martyred representations of Catholicism. The poster embodied the famous quote by Colombian priest Camilo Torres Restrepo, “If Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrillero.” Connected to Liberation Theology, Restrepo was a member of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and was killed by military forces in February 1966. His body was buried in a secret location so that a guerrilla priest could not become a revolutionary martyr.

Secrets, such as the disappearance of Restrepo’s body, produce knowledge that is not, does not want to, or cannot be spoken, but nevertheless cannot hide the traumas and horrors of wars and dictatorships. Secrets often leave traces, even when buried deep. These traces may come in the form of official documents with limited circulation, which are eventually released with carefully edited information. This was the case of a secret document produced by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on June 11, 1976. The document, which was recently disclosed by the Dom Helder Câmara State Memory and Truth Commission, mentions the activities of “front organizations of Soviet communism” operating in various countries. The list of organizations, which the document accuses of “annihilating democratic states” and being part of a global conspiracy, includes OSPAAAL. This revelation sheds new light on the organization’s history and raises important questions about the extent of its involvement in political subversion during the Cold War.

Edition details

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1945335149
• ISBN 13: 9781945335143
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Interference Archive, Hanna Lani, Hoyer Jen, MacPhee Josh, Ordez Vero, Seidman Sarah