Alberto Blanco González, FOR A VIETNAM TEN TIMES MORE BEAUTIFUL, 1980

Offset lithograph poster depicting a portrait of Ho Chi Minh rising up behind a group of workers, children and soldiers. Lettered across the bottom 'For a Vietnam ten times more beautiful' in Spanish, English, French and Arabic.

FOR A VIETNAM TEN TIMES MORE BEAUTIFUL

Creator: Alberto Blanco González
Commissioned by: OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America)
Date: 1980

Between the 1960s and 1990s, more than fifty designers worked at OSPAAAL (the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America). Based in Cuba, they made magazines and posters that were sent around the world. Their aim was to promote radical political ideas. Many of their posters celebrate socialist revolutions and liberation movements from the Global South.

President Hồ Chí Minh promised that a country “ten times more beautiful” would be rebuilt after the destruction caused by the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, allied with the U.S.A. (known as the ‘Vietnam War’ and ‘War Against the Americans to Save the Nation’).. This posthumous portrait of the leader pictures Vietnamese citizens in the socialist realist style used in propaganda posters from the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China.