Worm

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. 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.