Admittedly, as a researcher whose work largely focuses on analyzing discourse, I have never really paid much attention to the cover art of the books or magazines that form the object of my study. That changed, however, on a recent visit to the special collections on Cuba at the University of Nottingham in order to examine copies of Verde Olivo, the official magazine of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) since 1959.
One issue in particular caught my eye, published on August 6, 1967. Designed by one of the few prominent female graphic artists of the period, Nora Riquenes, its cover depicts a 32-wind, monochrome compass rose design, set against a rainbow of vertical stripes. The face of the compass featured the words “El deber de todo revolucionario es hacer la revolución,” “The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.” This statement was taken from one of Fidel Castro’s speeches, the 1962 Second Declaration of Havana, an incendiary call to arms to the people of Latin America. This cover acted as visual shorthand for the leadership’s principal foreign policy objective at that time: to spread revolution to all corners of the Americas. Here, I argue that such a bold guerilla symbol also had a domestic agenda.
The heady days of the early 1960s, when revolutionary fervor and idealism knew no bounds, were starting to fade away.
The compass on the magazine’s front cover, and the style of its presentation, were particularly interesting to me, given the timing of this edition. In late 1967, as its first decade in power drew to a close, the Cuban Revolution was approaching a crossroads. The heady days of the early 1960s, when revolutionary fervor and idealism knew no bounds, were starting to fade away. In their place dawned the sober reality that many of the lofty expectations set by the revolutionary leadership in 1959, especially concerning material benefits, had not yet been realized. Questions started to be raised about where the Revolution was headed, and how it would survive. At the same time, it was also starting to lose some of its luster for those living beyond the island’s shores. The overwhelming failure of Cuban-inspired rural guerrilla warfare campaigns throughout the hemisphere by the mid-1960s appeared to herald the end of Cuba’s myth-fueled tenure as the vanguard of armed struggle in Latin America.
Yet here was an unambiguous statement of one of the core principles that had underpinned the revolutionary project since its inception: that a revolution could be created through the sheer will of the people alone. These few words, simply expressed and instantly recognizable to the Cuban reader, also effectively encapsulated the very essence of Cuban thinking around revolutionary guerrilla warfare. These ideas placed emphasis on the moral obligation of the individual to foment revolution at whatever cost, and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
This message featured on the cover of one of Cuba’s most widely read publications at the time, and not just by members of the military and its reservists, who numbered in their hundreds of thousands, but also their families and friends. August 1967 coincided with the island’s hosting of the First (and, it would transpire, the last) Conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity, or OLAS, which brought together delegates from the region’s most prominent armed movements over ten days. The Conference itself, and Fidel Castro’s closing speech, reconfirmed the Revolution’s commitment to armed struggle as the only path to revolution in the Americas.
an idiom of ‘guerrillaness’ continued to permeate the leadership’s language well into the 1970s
But the very decision to endorse this guerrilla ethos in Verde Olivo also reveals something more about how the leadership attempted to mobilize the Cuban people. Having developed out of the Rebel Army that had brought the Revolution to power, the FAR had gradually become a more professionalized institution over the course of the 1960s, a transformation that would be completed with the so-called ‘Sovietization’ process of the Revolution in the 1970s. The Soviet influence seemed to do away with the more spontaneous, trial-and-error and therefore guerilla, approach to not only the organization of the FAR, but the revolutionary project more broadly. The Revolution’s guerrilla roots appeared to have been all but forgotten.
Yet my research on the Revolution’s heavy-handed, or hegemonic, discourse has shown that, far from disappearing, an idiom of ‘guerrillaness’ continued to permeate the leadership’s language well into the 1970s. Citizens and members of the Cuban military alike were actively encouraged throughout the first two decades to emulate the attitudes and values of the guerrillero. These values included self-sacrifice and a moral obligation to revolutionary duty, as exemplified in the excerpt from Castro’s speech.
After 1968, however, and more so in the 1970s, the promotion of a guerrilla ethos was often confined only to the language found inside of Verde Olivo; obvious visual celebrations of guerrilla values in the cover art became fewer and farther between, frequently replaced by images that showcased the FAR’s newly acquired military materiel, or commemorated significant dates in the Soviet historical narrative. The leadership thus gave the appearance of fully complying with Soviet orthodoxy, while continuing to espouse (albeit more subtly) the same beliefs and values that had always buttressed the Revolution.
With this shift in focus, Verde Olivo’s cover art also gradually lost much of its vibrancy. The multi-colored, psychedelic-tinged playful imagery of the 1960s gave way to more sedate hues, and an increased use of photography in place of graphic art. Scholars point to this emphasis on photographic representation as part of Soviet influence. Indeed, the OLAS cover featured here already showed a more pared-down aesthetic than that of the illustrations designed to mark the hosting of the Tricontinental Conference in Havana the previous year.
The changing face of the magazine partly reflects the changing dynamics of the Revolution itself. If the early to mid-1960s in Cuba were defined by images of idealistic barbudos and an atmosphere of unbridled optimism, the late 1960s and the 1970s were characterized by the drive to implement order and hierarchy where revolutionary zeal had once reigned. In other words, just as the covers of Verde Olivo never regained the vibrancy of the magazine’s early years, nor, in many ways, did the revolutionary project.