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.
