Roberto Estopiñán’s poster publicizes a Cuban protest march on Washington, D.C. on Cuban Independence Day. May 20 marks the date in 1902 on which Cuba formally gained independence from the United States which nonetheless retained the right to intervene in Cuban affairs. By the time the poster was produced, relations between the two countries had radically deteriorated; between 1961 and 1964, the U.S. government enacted a series of trade and economic embargos against Cuba in response to both Castro’s Communist regime and his increased cooperation with the Soviet Union. Estopiñán was a highly regarded Cuban sculptor, draftman, and printmaker; his stark image here of a head surrounded by barbed wire evokes the disturbing figurative forms of his drawings and sculptures of political prisoners, reflecting his own experiences as a political dissident in Cuba. Shortly after Castro’s Cuban Revolution of 1959, he immigrated to the United States.