The Lost Vault of Panart Album Covers
Uncovering the record label that marketed Cuban music to the world
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For the first piece of 2025, we have a special guest collaboration from Judy Cantor-Navas, a Grammy-nominated writer and author of Cuba on Record. Based in Barcelona, Spain, Judy is publishing the first-ever book about the first Cuban record label, Panart, on her Substack in serialized form. Below, she tells the story behind Panart alongside some of her favorite covers.
Panart Records captured a euphoric era in entertainment, bringing Cuban music to the world. In 1943, Panart’s cigar-wielding founder, Ramón Sabat, converted a colonial house in downtown Havana into a recording studio. He set the scene for recording the first cha-cha-chá, Afro-Cuban chants that were Celia Cruz’s surprising first singles, Mambo King Perez Prado’s early dance numbers, and Nat King Cole’s first Spanish-language album.
Sabat was a visionary entrepreneur and innovative engineer, a society geek who wore a tuxedo as casually as pajamas but whose nightcap of choice was Coca-Cola. The first Cuban record company that would challenge the stronghold of RCA Victor on the island, Panart encompassed the label, the island’s first record factory, and the recording studio. Sabat’s goal was to create a thriving market for domestic recorded music in Cuba and take Cuban music to the world through partnerships with international labels.
His seemingly impossible dream to record every kind of Cuban music paid off by the 1950s. By then, Panart was selling over a million records annually, pressed in the island’s first record factory and playing on Havana’s 10,000 jukeboxes. The label captured Cuban music’s golden age, whose rhythms were the soundtrack to post-war glamour and political turmoil. When new tourist-packed planes and aggressive U.S. businesses collided with mafia-run casinos and rebel bombs. Then, one morning in 1961, Panart disappeared, taken over by Cuba's new government. The Panart studio continued as the center of all Cuban music production in Havana for the state-owned label Egrem decades after its abrupt demise.
Looking back on Panart’s visuals, its album covers would beckon travelers to Cuba. Many records featured images of cabaret dancers lustily revealing cleavage and thighs. Some showed women embracing congas or bongo drums, posing as eye candy beside less alluring band leaders. Pictures of musicians in frilly sleeves or slim mid-century suits against tropical cityscapes also adorned covers that would-be travelers would take home to fuel their Havana dreams.
Panart was the first label to produce four-color printed covers in Havana. The label’s previous illustrated covers were phased out for ones featuring more eye-catching color photos commissioned by the label. Photos taken in the countryside and around the city, many on the grounds of the Tropicana nightclub, were shot by Charlie Varon, a New York photographer who that same year would capture a sloe-eyed Marilyn Monroe in a sequined halter dress seated at a table in Manhattan’s Astoria Hotel ballroom. While some Panart covers fed stereotypes of the "exotic" to market its groundbreaking recordings of Afro-Cuban music, on other albums, the label transcended the racist tropes of the times with portraits that put black Cuban artists center stage. Find some of these Panart gems below:
While we’re still visiting Cuba, I thought I’d highlight a few more designers who emerged in the late 60s after Panart was nationalized. The lively energy seen above in the Panart covers can be found in the funky typography and saturated color palettes that naturally occurred during that era in the work of Noelvis Diaz, Hipólito Cabrera, Pablo Labañino, and Amaury Febles. Their imagery is reflective of a post-revolution spirit, new and experimental.
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This article is such a treat! Thank you for sharing. The album covers allow us to make a pretty cool playlist from the album's music as well. :)
This is great.