The front of the official newspaper of the central committee of the Communist party of Cuba was dominated by a shot of Fidel Castro Ruz in his cap, waving the national flag under the historic Cuban slogan: “Hasta la victoria siempre!” There is no raised fist, no customary fat Cuban cigar this time and no gun brandished to underline El Comandante’s political fervour. That’s because the newspaper, which is called Granma after the yacht used to bring Castro’s revolutionary fighters from Mexico to Cuba in 1956, already shows Castro raising a rifle aloft in triumph on its masthead.

For 57 years the imagery of Castro and his Cuban revolution has stood for socialist rebellion. Whether despised or admired, its posters and slogans have been adopted as a stylish global shorthand for working-class revolt, more widely recognisable today than Marianne, the fictional French revolutionary mascot, or even Soviet images of Lenin.

Castro’s bushy beard, long cigar and green fatigues made him as instantly internationally recognisable as Chaplin, Monroe or the Queen. The famous outline of his dashing companion-at-arms, the “martyred”, beret-wearing Ernesto Che Guevara, may have adorned many more T-shirts, but in Cuba the two men enjoy a parity of greatness: their faces and their slogans painted on the sides of buildings throughout the island.

In January 1959, after two years of guerrilla fighting, Castro rode into Havana as the country’s new leader. At the age of 32 he was battle-worn, but it is this image of the leader in his peaked khaki cap, rifle over his shoulder, that was his most potent moment of branding.

According to collector Sandra Levinson, executive director of the Center for Cuban Studies, Castro claimed he did not want to appear on posters. His public argument was that his depiction on statues, dolls, walls and billboards was a distraction unless it was being used to communicate a particular political point. So it was enthusiastic artists, rather than official propagandists, who produced many of the original images of Castro.“But they were treated as posters and they were literally slapped up across the city,” said Levinson.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pedestrians pass by a poster of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, in Havana. Photograph: Alejandro Ernesto/EPA

One such poster, by the Cuban artist Felix René Mederos Pazos, shows a young, beardless Castro giving the speech he made on the 20th anniversary of the uprising at the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, an abortive but influential attack on the military staged in July 1953.

Yet Castro clearly always understood the power of visual propaganda. He used it in 1957 to secure victory when he invited foreign journalists and photographers to meet him in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra before his final victory push. And he continued to use it throughout his life.

Glamorous Guevara, by far the more photogenic of the two, became a hero of student bedsits in the West partly because he died young on a Bolivian airfield. But he also understood the importance of political iconography. “The revolutionary idea should be diffused by means of appropriate media to the greatest depth possible,” he said in 1960.

Graffiti style slogans such as “Socialismo o muerte” (Socialism or death), and “Yo soy la revolución” (I am the revolution) or simply “Venceremos!” (We will win!) replaced the commercial messages on the billboards and hoardings of Batista’s former republic soon after victory.

And Castro’s propaganda did not stop once the revolution became the establishment. As the prospect of free democratic elections diminished and stringent American economic sanctions kicked in, the Cuban government kept control of all magazines, newspapers and broadcasting facilities. Religious emblems were banned and so the devotional designs of the revolution took over. The white star of the Cuban flag appeared everywhere, along with the number 26, which marks the date of the July attack on the Moncada barracks, the formal beginning of the revolution.

The face of the leader remained central. Twenty-five years ago the Argentinian journalist Jacobo Timerman noted how impossible it was to escape El Comandante’s visual presence and how his legendarily long speeches were generously peppered with the word “I”, to maintain his personality cult.

A decade ago visual propaganda itself became a battleground. American diplomats stationed at their de facto embassy, the United States Interests Section inside Havana’s Swiss embassy, began to use their building to display selected American news bulletins in Spanish. The Cubans retaliated by blocking out the view of the messages with a series of black flags commemorating sacrificed revolutionary lives.

“The press has called this ‘the billboard war,’ which I find funny and amusing, but I don’t consider this to be a war,” said Michael Parmly, head of the interests section. “Uur effort is to communicate with the Cuban people.”Outside the island, the appeal of Cuban revolutionary posters was founded partly on a period of fashionable unrest in Europe and partly on the exotic allure inherited from Cuba’s pre-revolutionary days as a Caribbean playground.

”The very media, which in pre-revolutionary Cuba were the most completely subservient to consumerism, have effected a dramatic transition for which there is no precedent anywhere,” wrote David Kunzle in his book Public Graphics in Cuba. “All the arts in Cuba – theatre, music, dance, literature – have undergone a radical transformation; but it is in the visual mass media which capitalism evolved to serve its own specific and historic needs that the transition to socialist values appears the most extraordinary.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paintings of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul on the wall in downtown Havana. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

Dramatic visual images were always a key to Havana’s look. As writers Steven Heller and Vicki Gold write in Cuba Style, their book about the popular art of Battista’s regime: “Art deco streamline elegance and Las Vegas carnival gaudiness fused with the country’s own eclectic African and Spanish cultures to produce a distinctly Cuban panache.”

With Castro came bright political murals instead of the garish advertisements for condensed milk and casinos.

In a city largely left intact, although crumbling, despite Castro’s plans for a rebuild, Havana wears its contrasting history on its sleeve. “The fabric of the city of Havana has often been compared with an old and crumpled suit of clothes; the posters are like a flower stuck in its buttonhole,” wrote Kunzle.