Worm
A Cuban American Odyssey
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
From “America’s illustrator in chief” (Fast Company), a stunning graphic memoir of a childhood in Cuba, coming to America on the Mariel boatlift, and a defense of democracy, here and there
Hailed for his iconic art on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world, Edel Rodriguez is among the most prominent political artists of our age. Now for the first time, he draws his own life, revisiting his childhood in Cuba and his family’s passage on the infamous Mariel boatlift.
When Edel was nine, Fidel Castro announced his surprising decision to let 125,000 traitors of the revolution, or “worms,” leave the country. The faltering economy and Edel’s family’s vocal discomfort with government surveillance had made their daily lives on a farm outside Havana precarious, and they secretly planned to leave. But before that happened, a dozen soldiers confiscated their home and property and imprisoned them in a detention center near the port of Mariel, where they were held with dissidents and criminals before being marched to a flotilla that miraculously deposited them, overnight, in Florida.
Through vivid, stirring art, Worm tells a story of a boyhood in the midst of the Cold War, a family’s displacement in exile, and their tenacious longing for those they left behind. It also recounts the coming-of-age of an artist and activist, who, witnessing American’s turn from democracy to extremism, struggles to differentiate his adoptive country from the dictatorship he fled. Confronting questions of patriotism and the liminal nature of belonging, Edel Rodriguez ultimately celebrates the immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In depicting both Cuba and the United States at their best and worst, Time cover artist Rodriguez's debut graphic memoir is a stunningly rendered elegy for the dreams of revolutionaries, immigrants, and parents. The story begins with Rodriguez's birth in 1971 in a small town south of Havana. Scarcity forces Cubans to be resourceful and his father opens a successful photography studio, but not without arousing the suspicion of the Communist Party. Rodriguez's parents decide to leave when they begin to believe government-run schools are brainwashing children. In 1980, the government agrees to let people leave by boat—but not without stalling, harassing, and calling them "worms." The family makes it to Miami on a Jamaican shrimp boat. Later, Rodriguez studies art at New York City's Pratt Institute. In 2016, he recognizes similarities between the rises of Donald Trump and Fidel Castro: "I saw shades of my childhood in Cuba, of the repudiation acts against people considered enemies." As his art pushes back against totalitarianism and media bias, he counters insults by declaring, "I lost one country. I'm not going to lose another without a fight." The comics feature strong black line drawings against red and army-green backgrounds, with Trump-related images inserted as a shock of orange and yellow. It's a bracing warning bell for any reader concerned about the future of American democracy.
