Rafael Morante, Outstanding Graphic Designer in Cuba, Dies

June 27, 2022

The designer, publicist, illustrator, cartoonist and writer, Rafael Morante Boyerizo, passed away this Sunday in Havana at the age of 90, with a distinguished career that earned him the National Design Prize 2015, among numerous recognitions, highlights the Ministry of Culture of the island.

Morante, born in Madrid in 1931, arrived in Cuba in 1940, as part of the exiles who left Spain during the Civil War, and from then on developed a career that before 1959 was marked by his work in advertising agencies.

For more than sixty years he collaborated in various publications, designing collections, logos, numerous covers and a large number of illustrations.

He was one of the founders of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (Icaic), the Higher Institute of Industrial Design (ISDI) and the Cuban Institute of the Book (ICL).

As a poster artist he was recognized among the first of the Icaic, with a body of work that is considered essential for the study of graphic design.

Along with designers such as Eduardo Muñoz Bachs and Eladio Rivadulla he participated in the design and reproduction of the first Icaic cinema posters in screen printing.

One of them was the commemoration of the first anniversary of the Cinematheca of Cuba, in which with a two-color synthesized formulation he introduced for the first time the representation of Chaplin, which became the most recurring symbolic figure of Cuban cinema posters. He also designed the magazine Cine Cubano.

Morante was a professor at the Institute of Industrial Design, the Ministry of Internal Trade, the Institute of Commercial Design (Bolivia), the University College of Segovia and at the European Institute of Design in Madrid, and was also a consultant and thesis advisor at various universities, as well as a lecturer and speaker at national and international events.

In 2001 he received the Distinction for National Culture, the Espacio Prize for Lifetime Work from the Cuban Association of Advertisers and Propagandists and the National Book Design Prize.

To this are added other distinctions such as the Eduardo Muñoz Bachs Prize for Graphic Design (2010), the Laureate Seal of the National Union of Workers of Cuba (2014), the Master of Youth Prize.

In addition to his work as a draftsman and illustrator, he published the novels "Love This Side of the Stars," winner of the David Prize for Science Fiction (1984) and "Exiled in Time," published by Letras Cubanas Publishing House in 1990.

His fantastic and science fiction stories are collected in various anthologies in Cuba and abroad. He also created comic strips, among them, "Alona" and "The Others."