Sunshine and revolution

This past summer I was hanging around the book sale at our street party when one of the neighbours appeared, not with yet another John Grisham novel to donate, but with two huge, enormous, gigantic, brilliantly coloured posters.

They were amazing, and the woman who was running the sale and I quickly each handed over ten bucks and took charge of our posters without bothering anyone else with the information that they even existed. All's fair in such situations, indeed.

Mine was a bit ripped on the bottom, and in my excitement to show Stephen, I quickly unrolled it and ripped it even more. It is on crappy, cheap, old paper. There are traces on the back of paint from the printing process.

Can you guess who these happy people are? The happy handsome dudes, the happy guitarist and the happy astronaut? Is he really an astronaut, one wonders, or maybe a deep-sea diver?

They are all working happily together with these guys, Fidel and Che.

Enjoying the sunshine and the music and the bounty of the land and all that stuff, in poster-paint colours, in Cuba.

I think the guy below Che is Raul Castro. You can see an old picture of him here. At first we wondered why Shakespeare was on a Cuban poster.

My neighbour said she brought a few of these back from Cuba in the 1970s and these two were the last of her stash. I am so glad she figured it was time to pass them on.

I looked into framing this. It is about 3 feet by 5, so a piece of glass to cover it would be horribly heavy and atrociously expensive. I hemmed and hawed about it for some time, but finally just stuck it up with pins. I'm sure it has suffered graver troubles in its time. One day I will treat it properly. And now it makes me smile whenever I see it!