BACHS HURACANES CUBAN POSTER

This hand silk screened poster by acclaimed Cuban poster designer Eduardo Munoz Bachs promotes a 1973 Cuban animated cartoon ("dibujo animado") titled Huracanes directed by Hernan Henriquez.

An intricately designed, old-fashioned cast iron weather vane fills up the poster page, with a rooster standing on the top.  Rather than announcing daylight, as he might typically do, this rooster is crowing out the word HURACANES, as shown in the cartoonish speech balloon extending from his open beak. 

The four arms of the weather vane point in each of the four directions, but the rooster doesn't seem to have an arm on which to swivel in order to indicate the direction of the wind.  He looks quite stationary, though his eye, which is a swirling mass of concentric circles, suggests that he in fact has been spinning around quite a bit.

Of course all this begs the question of how a rooster on top of a weather vane would be able to predict hurricanes in the first place. Perhaps the film addresses the question of roosters and the futility of predictions when it comes to hurricanes, at least in 1973 when this film was made.

Eduardo Munoz Bachs (1937-2001) was born in Spain, but his family emigrated to Cuba in 1941. Though he had no formal art training, he began designing posters in 1960 for the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos, the state-run organization formed after the revolution to promote Cuban films.  During his lifetime he designed over 2,000 posters for the ICAIC and is considered one of the great Cuban film poster artists of his era. His posters are typically characterized by his use of bright and bold colors and his wry sense of humor. Many of his poster designs have a “cartoon” quality (as seen here), and in fact he drew a cartoon strip in addition to designing posters. He also illustrated books and painted.

Check out our other posters by this acclaimed Cuban poster designer.  You'll be charmed by them all.  

Condition: A