Cuba: My Revolution

Written by Inverna Lockpez
Art by Dean Haspiel

There aren't enough comics like this.  The writer of Cuba: My Revolution is a Cuban-American fine artist, and this terrific graphic novel is based on her experiences as a young woman in revolutionary Cuba.  When we first meet Sonya, Lockpez's fictional alter ego, she is 17 and getting ready to go out for New Year's Eve with her stepfather's thirty-five year old cousin.  Sonya is an interesting person - she's equally adept at painting as she is with a scalpel, and she soon becomes involved with the newly victorious Fidel Castro's militia.

What follows is a slow, excruciating process through which Sonya eventually loses all faith in Castro and his regime.  It's fascinating to watch as this young woman struggles against all evidence to maintain her belief in the revolution.  Even when she is arrested and tortured for trying to save the life of a wounded prisoner, Sonya clings to the belief that the horrid treatment she received was simply a mistake.  Eventually, even the strongest of faiths can be eroded by a constant stream of evidence to the contrary, and as things become harder and harder for people living in Cuba, Sonya has to wake up.

The book veers a little close to the type of anti-Cuban rhetoric we are used to seeing from the United States, and I would have liked to learn a little more of what happened to Sonya upon arriving in the US, but I did enjoy this book quite a bit.  As with his other recent Vertigo book, The Alcoholic, artist Dean Haspiel does a terrific job of depicting the memoirist author's experiences.  Good stuff.