Antonio Prohías: A Brilliant Cuban Cartoonist in Exile

For those of us who loved comics and cartoons in Cuba during the 1950’s, Antonio Prohías was a hero and a superstar.

He was Cuban, damn it, not like all those other foreign cartoonists in the Sunday papers or in comic books, and his cartoons were so outrageously funny.

“El Hombre Siniestro”, one of his characters, was absolutely hilarious.

Even though kids normally have trouble with subtlety, the cartoons of Prohías were hilarious.  Maybe he taught the virtues of subtlety to a lot of us who were children.  And his subtlety had a distinctly Cuban accent, unmistakably sardonic and paradoxical.

Much of his work appeared in Zig-Zag a humor magazine and in the newspaper El Mundo.

Prohías disappeared in 1960 –along with Zig-Zag — one of the many signs of the Castronoid apocalypse we were all experiencing.

For me, at the age of nine, his sudden disappearance mattered a lot.  Something must be awfully wrong, I thought.

Then, when I arrived in the U.S. in 1962, I discovered “Mad” magazine.  Ñooooooo!  There he was, “El Hombre Siniestro,” transformed into twins in “Spy vs. Spy.”

And there he was in Zig-Zag magazine, too, which had disappeared in Castrogonia, but was now being published in Miami, and which I sold door to door in the neighborhood around the Orange Bowl.  Prohías moonlighted as a brilliant political cartoonist too….

Take a look at the cartoon below.  Nothing has changed, 55 years later….

I couldn’t afford buying “Mad” magazine until 1965, when I started delivering newspapers and had a steady income of $5 a week (on a good week, when I managed to collect from all my customers). So for three years or so I would read”Mad”in stores, off the magazine rack, little by little.  I spent a lot of time going to stores, to get my dose of “Mad” and Prohías.

The mere fact that he was Cuban, and that he came from my past, from that other dimension, that lost world –reminiscent of Jor-El’s vanished planet Kripton in the Superman comic books — gave me a special connection to “Mad” that I felt for no other publication.

After all, what other American publication featured art from someone who understood the full horrors of communism and drew the best Fidel caricatures in the world?

 

But how did Prohías get to “Mad” magazine, I often asked myself later, as an adult.  As a kid, it seemed obvious: “Mad” employed the greatest cartoonists, so why wouldn’t they have snatched up Prohías?  Famous people always remain famous, right?

But as an adult, it became clear to me that Prohías must have endured the same painful entry into “el exilio” as the rest of us.  Americans didn’t know what went on in Cuba.  No one here could have seen Prohías’s work.  Hell, no one here knew that we wore shoes in Cuba, or that we knew how to use toilet paper, and didn’t decorate our noses with chicken bones.

So, how did he do it?  How did he transition from a menial refugee job to cartoonist at a smart-ass magazine with Jewish sensibilities (and a largely Jewish staff). It must have involved some major chutzpah on his part, and some very perceptive hiring by the editors of “Mad.”

If you want to know what happened, a recently published article has some of the details.

From Atlas Obscura:

How Cuba’s greatest cartoonist fled from Castro and created ‘Spy vs. Spy’

by Eric Grundhauser

One of the greatest rivalries of all time has been raging since 1961 between two figures who don’t even have real names.

The pro/antagonists of the long-running gag strip Spy vs. Spy have been trying to one-up each other for decades, and it’s all thanks to a Cuban expatriate who was once accused of being a spy himself.

The creator of Spy vs Spy, Antonio Prohías, had already enjoyed a successful career as an illustrator in his native Cuba before he created the legendary strip. Born in Cienfuego, Cuba in 1921, Prohías picked up illustration at an early age thanks to a sympathetic teacher, then went on to study briefly at Havana’s San Alejandro Academy before leaving after a year to become a full-time newspaper illustrator. After working his way up through some smaller publications, and receiving a number of awards for his editorial cartoons— including Cuba’s highest newspaper honor, the Juan Gualberto Gomez medal—Prohías achieved national fame while working for Cuba’s (at the time) largest newspaper, El Mundo, beginning at the end of the 1940s.

His style was defined by clear, bold lines, and exaggerated comic forms which would eventually evolve into the characters of Spy vs. Spy. Award-winning artist Peter Kuper, who currently creates Spy vs. Spy for MAD Magazine described the spies, saying, “They have this very strange look to them, that I’m now used to, but their shape is so odd.” Kuper, a lifelong political illustrator and author, whose latest book, Ruins, recently won the Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album, took over Spy vs. Spy duties in 1997. “Which is kind of wonderful because they create this surreal universe just by their appearance.”

Back in Cuba, years before he he would make the Black and White spies (and later the female, Grey Spy), Prohías created a number of popular characters, which he used to comment on both the government, and life in the country. His most famous creation prior to Spy vs. Spy was a comedically vicious character known as El Hombre Siniestro. This agent of chaos, in his wide-brimmed hat and exaggerated snout, was an early, more grim, iteration of the spies. The “ Sinister Man” took part in a series of wordless capers where he rained down hilarious misfortune on unlucky passersby. While many of the gag strips weren’t outwardly political, in a quote recounted in the introduction to Spy vs Spy: The Complete Casebook, Prohías described the character as being, “born out of the national psychosis of the Cuban people.”

By 1959, Prohías was not only enjoying a successful run at El Mundo, as well as in magazines including the political Bohemia, but he had also become the president of the Cuban Cartoonists Association, making him possibly the most famous cartoonist in Cuba.

Keep reading HERE... much more….