The novel Moncada by French writer Robert Merle is a fictious retelling of Fidel Castro’s failed insurgence in Santiago de Cuba and full of heroic, gun-toting comrades hiding out in the rainforest. For some reason it is etched on my memory. Perhaps because it brought to life a lost collective mythology during my own post-Soviet-bloc upbringing. If you wanted to read this monument to the early days of the Cuban revolution your only option would be in either French, Spanish, Italian or German. There doesn’t appear to be an English translation—not surprising considering Cold War politics. 

“A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design” at the Cranbrook Museum lifts the veil of another previously inaccessible aspect of post-revolution Cuba for a North American audience. It assembles the output of two state-owned Cuban manufacturers, Dujo Muebles and EMPROVA, through a display of chairs, two buildings (the Cuban pavilion at the 67 Montreal Expo and a 60s asbestos panel house that never went into widespread production), and a reconstructed particleboard system, FURNITUREWALL, made with a byproduct from sugar cane extraction. The show is a classic museum exhibition. Furniture sits on white pedestals and on a central catwalk. Small objects are under bonnets. This is not a showroom but an arrangement of unseen originals. Many are effigies for wider practices in the island’s design circles, grappling with indigeneity, colonial history, nepotism, modernism and mass production. 

Design and politics can be hard to pair in an exhibition. There is no “communist” chair. Context is brought in through auxiliary means: posters and leaflets. But the works on show and the biographies of their designers, from exile to political activism, do tell of the country’s complicated and changing relationship to world politics: Dujo’s chairs were the only Latin American representation at the 67 Paris furniture show, at a time when communism’s popularity in Europe had a stronghold in France. And despite more recent Obama-era relaxations in the US-Cuba relationship, even today, a show on Cuban design in a North American museum still feels like a remarkable novelty.

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