Cuban tobacco companies carved out a distinguished reputation in the early twentieth century. In part, this regard was due to an essential part of the packaging: the cigarette card. A backing for flimsy cigarette packets, the card provided a tantalizing image for audiences to collect. Many of the cards were actual photographic prints, similar to those produced at portrait studios. The ones in the cigarette packets were, however, smaller and often featured stars of the stage and screen, actors and actresses that were fashion trendsetters.
In between the World Wars, inexpensive photograph production became widely available in the Americas. Cuban tobacco companies were quick to take advantage of the new medium. Aguilitas, a company that had success in the 1920s with a small series of Cuban baseball cards, teamed up with film distribution companies in the 1930s to feature a larger series of still images from Hollywood films. If the company was to expand its consumer base, attention to women was essential. The challenge was to collect enough different cards, through buying tobacco or through trading, to fill all 360 spots in an album, also provided by the company. Full albums on the collector’s market today reveal that some people actually managed to collect every single one.
The movie ‘We Live Again’ (1934) was a failure in the United States but managed to make a small profit abroad thanks to successful marketing. One of Aguilitas’ albums included twelve image cards from ‘Vivamos de nuevo,’ as it was known in Spanish, and Cuban audiences avidly collected them. The paper in the album was inexpensive, and the photographs were printed on low-grade paper that was prone to oxidation (a nice way of describing photographic rust) but the images were alluring. See the portraits of Frederic March and Anna Sten, in the image above. One could hold them up and examine the glamour up close. The burn marks on Anna Sten’s allow us to imagine that someone was looking at her and also smoking.
The marketing worked.
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