Actualidades Mundiales No. 64, a Spanish world-news map from 1959

A Spanish-language world-news poster for Latin America, catalog date 10 March 1959, from a U.S. Information Agency post. Captioned photographs linked to a yellow world map cover Chinese collective farms, Alaska statehood, Castro's victory over Batista in Cuba, an Atlas launch, and the two halves of Berlin (NAID 6948887).

The layout

The archive describes a yellow world map with captioned photographs joined to it by lines. There are nine captions, each opening with a place name in capitals: China, Alaska, New York, Stockholm, Cuba, Cape Canaveral, Berlin twice, and Brisbane. They run from Mao's collective farms to a Peruvian tennis player in the Davis Cup.

CHINA.—He aquí el triste cuadro que ofrecen quienes hasta hace poco fueron pequeños propietarios en China: sin hogar, sin tierras y sin propiedades. [...]

CUBA.—Después de una guerra civil de dos años, Fidel Castro, Jefe de las Fuerzas Rebeldes de Cuba, derrocó el régimen del dictador Batista. Castro ha proclamado a Manuel Urrutia el Presidente Provisional de Cuba.

CHINA.—Here is the sad picture presented by those who until recently were small proprietors in China: without home, without land and without property. [...]

CUBA.—After a two-year civil war, Fidel Castro, Chief of the Rebel Forces of Cuba, overthrew the regime of the dictator Batista. Castro has proclaimed Manuel Urrutia Provisional President of Cuba.

Who made it

A U.S. Information Agency post made it, in the maker line's words "USIS post," for the agency's series of posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Neither the post nor the country is named, and the transcription prints no agency name; the archive classes the source as unidentified. No print run is recorded.

How to read it

FRAME tags it card stacking: the selection sets hardship in the Communist bloc against American achievement and a prosperous West Berlin. The China caption is the sharpest. It says the peasants of tomorrow will have no steady work, home or family life if Mao's plan succeeds, and it sources its figure of 25,000 collective farms only to "authoritative sources." The Berlin caption describes the western sector's hotels and night clubs against "the poor appearance of the Russian Sector."

The Cuba caption is different. It calls Batista a dictator, names Castro as leader of the rebel forces, and reports the provisional president without comment. A reader can set that beside a Washington newspaper cartoon from late 1960, In English or Spanish, which sets a small Castro beneath a looming U.S. Navy ship at Guantanamo.

Every news sheet chooses its stories. This one chose them to make a case, and it did not say on its face that a foreign government had made it. For another Spanish-language sheet in the same file, see the 1957 People's Capitalism exhibition poster. The U.S. Information Agency hub has the wider set.