The comparison might seem like a stretch, and it is certain to provoke outrage within the Cuban American community. The drawings are from Rodriguez’s forthcoming graphic memoir, which tells his story as a Cuban immigrant he summarizes it as “my life between two insurrections.” Capitol, on which the Cuban Capitol was modelled. In the second, the men wear MAGA hats, brandish sticks, and wave American and Confederate flags the placard reads “Trump.” The first is a portrait of January 8, 1959, in Havana, when the Cuban Revolution deposed Fulgencio Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power the second is of January 6, 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. In the first, the men have beards, wear military caps, hold rifles, and wave Cuban flags a placard reads “Patria o muerte” (“Fatherland or death”). Only when you look closer do you realize that the drawings portray two very different events. In one, a crowd of protesting men march toward the viewer, with a domed Capitol in the background in the other, a crowd of protesting men, this time with their backs to the viewer, march toward what looks like the same building. Initially, they appeared to be different perspectives of the same scene. We spent some time looking at two drawings, in particular.

“After the Insurrection,” which was first published as the cover of the January 18, 2021, issue of The New Yorker. (In 2016, a cover for Time’s “ Meltdown” series, showing an orange head, with no features except for a yelling mouth and bright-yellow hair, melting away, won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ award for best magazine cover.) The show features Rodriguez’s editorial work, and also a selection of his drawings, posters, book covers, acrylic paintings, and Cuban-cigar-box assemblages. Rodriguez, who is fifty-one, is best known for his striking editorial illustrations of the Trump years, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, including “ After the Insurrection,” in which an American flag waves at half-mast against a dark sky, and which appeared on the cover of the magazine the week after January 6, 2021. Its theme, he explained, is “the state of the world in the past thirteen years”: horrible, but you can still laugh about it. On a recent, gray morning, I drove with the Cuban American artist Edel Rodriguez in his blue Mini Cooper to the County College of Morris (C.C.M.), in Randolph, New Jersey, to see the latest show of his work, “Apocalypso” (a portmanteau of “apocalypse” and “calypso,” for the often satirical popular Caribbean music).

Tossed by the waves book