Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey

(Hardback)

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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, of a family's displacement in exile and of 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 immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom.

Author Bio

EDEL RODRIGUEZ was born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba. He received a B.F.A. in Painting from Pratt Institute in 1994 and an M.F.A. from Hunter College in 1998. He is the recipient of both a Gold and a Silver Medal for editorial illustration from the Society of Illustrators. His work has been featured on the covers of Time, the New Yorker and Der Spiegel; other clients include MTV, Pepsi, U.S. Postal Service, Nike, Rolling Stone, GQ, Playboy, Reader's Digest, National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Conde Naste Traveler, the Washington Post and the Losa Angeles Times.

Edel's artwork is in the collections of numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., as well as in many private collections.