The Artist’s Voice

This chapter includes an overview of the origin and evolution of Ediciones Vigía, which resonated with the Arte Povera movement, as well as the development of Vigía’s aesthetics, materials employed, and production process. Rolando Estévez Jordán discusses his practice of book design, Vigía’s collaborative work, the effect of political events on the publisher, and the artisans’ involvement in the production of Vigía’s multiple originals.

An Enchanting Exchange

The publications of Ediciones Vigía have intense emotional lives that provoke surprise and enchantment among reader-viewers. This chapter explores how and why Vigía books have become such prized possessions by highlighting their circulation through both the market economy of collectors, consumers, and tourists and the affective economy of gift exchange. It theorizes that the emotional intimacy and aesthetic experience engendered by the handcrafted books draw reader-viewers into the press’s community of writers, artists, artisans, and admirers. This investment, in turn, provides a symbolic antidote to the spiritual deprivation of a utilitarian state and re-inspires the liberating idealism once promised by twentieth-century Latin American revolutionary movements.

“Vigía es Elegguá”

In a 2007 issue of Ediciones Vigía’s magazine for young people, Barquitos del San Juan, Rolando Estévez Jordán pays homage to Elegua, one of the most important orishas in the transcultural religious system of Santería. Through visual and cultural analyses of the journal, this chapter shows how Vigía became an Elegua within Cuban culture. Ediciones Vigía opened doors between Cuban national identity and Afro-Cuban culture, a contentious but interdependent pairing that has animated Cuban life since the liberation wars in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Between Wonder and Resonance

Ediciones Vigía’s use of found materials, spirit of improvisation, and aesthetic of bricolage echo the ethos of the Special Period, a time of extreme austerity measures prompted by the loss of Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s. Although Vigía was not a product of the era, it has been grafted onto the history of revolutionary Cuba because of these resonances. By considering Vigía in relationship to other fine art movements (including the art collective, Ordo Amoris) and Cuban popular culture (like the official pamphlet, Con nuestros propios esfuerzos), this chapter illustrates the myriad ways the Special Period is remembered and reconfigured in the collective memory of contemporary Cuba.

The Brilliant Poverty of Vigía

There was a radical change in cultural policy following the Cuban Revolution. The founding of Imprenta Nacional and the National School of Art were attempts to make the arts accessible to as many people as possible, not for profit but for political and cultural purposes. Ediciones Vigía inherited this revolutionary agenda when the press was established a quarter of a century later, along with the aspirations of global, hemispheric, and national movements—including notably Arte Povera, publishing collectives, and the New Art. The chapter examines three hallmarks of Vigía publications—their synthesis of literary and visual arts, graphic style, and expression of literary symbolism through natural and/or found materials—to explore the history of artists’ books in Cuba and develop a critical discourse for its continued study.

For the Love of Beautiful Books

Rolando Estévez was the founding and guiding artistic director of Ediciones Vigía from its inception in 1985, in his hometown of Matanzas, Cuba, until 2014. In this personal reflection, the Cuban-American author recalls Estévez’s aesthetic and philosophical ideals, explores some of the dozens of handmade book designs he produced over his three decades as director, and looks at some of the authors, artists, and themes memorialized in his designs. The impact of the Cuban Revolution in separating and later bringing together Cubans on the island and in the diaspora is addressed in the author’s reflections on her friendship and artistic relationship with Estévez. Inspired by Estévez to write bilingual poems in English and Spanish, these poems were published in Ediciones Vigía, making Behar the first Cuban-American writer to be featured in these handmade Cuban books.

Tracing the Tracks of Time in Natural Love

This chapter features a comparative analysis of Cántico de la huella, an erotic elegy by Cuban poet Nancy Morejón, and of Rolando Estévez’s interpretation of the poem in his book design, which included a cover of two lovers perched in a tree face to face. Díaz discusses the literary and artistic traditions that coalesce mind and body as an impression of quantum spacetime, the eternal present of the poetic voice, while she explores the way Estévez captures the essence of the poem and symbolically enhances its sensual quality.

Introduction

This is the first anthology to bring together a broad framework of personal and scholarly perspectives on the handmade books of Ediciones Vigía in Matanzas, Cuba, and its project of producing beautiful books in the age of technology. Writers and scholars from Cuba and the United States come together to celebrate, analyze, and comprehend the major contributions that Ediciones Vigía has made, with limited resources but enormous creativity and inventiveness, to keep the book alive as a cultural and artistic form. In eleven chapters, the blend of voices and visions offers a variety of distinct perspectives—poetic, theoretical, critical, and historical—on the legacy of Ediciones Vigía and its place in Cuban literary and artistic culture from its origins in the mid-1980s to today, addressing the central role that book artist Rolando Estévez played in creating its unique visual poetics. In closing remarks, Behar reflects on Estévez’s decision to leave Ediciones Vigía and create his own independent imprint, El Fortín, also in Matanzas. The anthology includes a stunning collection of reproductions from the handmade books that will pique the interest of book lovers everywhere.

Vigía Iconography and the Construction of a Cuban Identity

Ediciones Vigia’s chief designer, Rolando Estévez Jordán, created his own artistic language by adopting and adapting iconography from a variety of traditions that span the vanguardia and New Art movements in Cuban art to ancient Greece statuary, medieval manuscripts, and modernist works of Western art. This chapter considers how Vigía created its own vision of twentieth-century Cuban history and contemporary Cuban identity through these allusions as well as the material designs of the books and the literature published within them.

Estévez Always Walking on the Grass

In this poetic essay Nancy Morejón describes meeting Rolando Estévez and Alfredo Zaldívar for the first time, while she reflects on Vigía’s publication of her poetry. She situates her own relationship with her once unsung publishers, who, by opening a new frontier in expressivity, successfully managed to make do with the stifling shortages of the so-called Special Period, a time when Cuba’s printers gave top priority to producing books for mass education. She also discusses Estévez’s art of bookmaking and its historical and spatial contexts in the cities of Matanzas and Havana. Furthermore, Morejón ponders on the significance of nature and death in all of Estevez’s creations.