“I wanted this story to be told because in places like Spain and other countries in Europe they think that Cuba is an ideal country”
EFE (via 14ymedio), Hugo Barcia, Miami, 8 August 2025 — Illustrator Edel Rodríguez, known for his covers of Time, The New York Times and Der Spiegel magazines, is used to portraying what is happening around him, but in the documentary ‘Freedom is a Verb’, which will be released digitally next Tuesday, he is the one being portrayed.
His time in Cuba, where he was born in 1971, his exile to the United States during the Mariel exodus in 1980 and his progressive path to his current fame have been compressed into just 18 minutes to create a documentary that reviews Rodríguez’s artistic career. “The documentary tells a lot about the Cuban experience, about what it is like to be a Cuban born in Cuba and to be a refugee”, the artist told EFE in a virtual interview.
“I wanted this story to be told because in places like Spain and other countries in Europe they believe that Cuba is an ideal country and that the Revolution was very good for the country,” Rodríguez added.
Freedom has always been the artist’s driving force. It was what pushed his family to leave the island when Rodríguez was a child and it is what now influences his covers, which are seen all over the world. “When I do my work I always have that in mind: people in Cuba are looking at me, people in Iran are looking at me. I have friends in Iran who write to me in secret,” the illustrator admitted.
And while he fled Cuba in search of freedom, Rodríguez said that in recent months, after President Donald Trump came to power, he has been reacquainted with an old friend in the United States: fear. “It’s not Cuban-style fear of a dictatorship that is going to lock you up”, Rodríguez said, but it is a kind of self-censorship for fear of “pissing someone off” and that it might affect his work or the funding a gallery or media outlet receives.
It’s not a Cuban-style fear of a dictatorship that you will lock you up,” Rodriguez said, but it is a kind of self-censorship for fear of “pissing someone off”.
The artist regretted having witnessed this fear first-hand, assuring that “there have been several situations” in which galleries or media have been reluctant to publish his work, although he maintains that he knows how to deal with it. Trump has been the subject of some of Rodríguez’s most famous covers, and in the documentary he tells how he usually depicts the US president’s face completely in orange and always without eyes. “I want people to pay more attention to what he is doing. When you make eye contact with someone, you have more empathy with that person or with the illustration,” the artist is heard saying in the documentary.
The artist regretted having witnessed this fear first-hand, assuring that “there have been several situations” in which galleries or media have been reluctant to publish his work, although he maintains that he knows how to deal with it. Trump has been the subject of some of Rodríguez’s most famous covers, and in the documentary he tells how he usually depicts the US president’s face completely in orange and always without eyes. “I want people to pay more attention to what he is doing. When you make eye contact with someone, you have more empathy with that person or with the illustration,” the artist is heard saying in the documentary.
‘Freedom is a Verb’ was released in November 2024, but until now it has only been available at festivals in the United States and Europe. From next Tuesday it will be available in digital format on YouTube. “The film invites you to reflect on the fragility of democracy, censorship (…) and the value of activism, of people taking to the streets”, said Creus.
Translated by GH
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