Mi vida en Cuba
Juan Padrón
GRAPHIC MEMOIR | 2021 | 288 pages
A GRAPHIC MEMOIR BY THE GREAT MASTER OF LATIN AMERICAN CARTOONS (1947-2020)
Juan Padrón, the mythical creator of Elpidio Valdés and Vampiros en la Habana, began drawing his life in 2017. Mi vida en Cuba [A Cuban Life] is a graphic memoir where Cuba's most prominent cartoonist narrates his life and the historical context around him. The book starts with his family's migration from Spain to Cuba in the mid-19th century and the years that followed: Cuban independence from Spain and the US-dominated Batista government during which Padrón was born. His own story starts during his childhood, with the end of the Batista regime and the arrival of the Cuban Socialist revolution, and ends in the 1970s, when Padrón started making animated films.
His story is made up of a great variety of personal and family stories that, at the same time, weave together an individual and collective History with a capital H. In all of these stories, his sincere testimonial stands out as he tells us how he developed his passion for a drawing as a profession in what is probably the most unpredictable country in Latin America.
On the one year anniversary of Juan Padrón's death, Reservoir Books is honored to publish his last work, which places him directly in conversation with the Olympus of the great cartoonists who have told the story of their youths through cartoons.
With a prologue by Mauricio Vicent and an epilogue by Alberta Durán.
RIGHTS: spanish RESERVOIR BOOKS
“Juan Padrón stood out wherever he went, and everyone would gather round to listen to his stories filled with irony, humor, and freshness...I can give faith that in this book he appears just like he was in real life: a magical and unforgettable character.”
“Juan Padrón is an absolute genius. He is the comics, the humors, the cartoons, the animations of Cuba.”
“One of the most important personalities of Cuban artistic culture in the last five decades.”
“There is no doubt that this book is his most brilliant and—ironically—most complete creation.”
