Graphic Nonfiction by Maxence Emery and Thomas Humeau

Translated from the French by Edward Gauvin

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Definitions

Batista: Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was Cuba’s military dictator before the revolution of 1958.
Che (Guevara): Originally from Argentina, Che Guevara became a prominent revolutionary leader throughout Latin America. Guevara was a military leader in the Cuban Revolution alongside Fidel and Raúl Castro, and played a large role in the Cuban government after the revolution.
Hippie: A member of a youth movement of the 1960s. Hippies embraced rock music and other new forms of art, protested against war and traditional values, and promoted peace, freedom, and love.
Marxist: Named after philosopher Karl Marx, “Marxist” refers to an economic, social, and political theory that argues that the inequalities of life in capitalist societies lead to conflicts between people in different social classes.

First published in English in Words Without Borders' February 2015 issue: International Graphic Novels: Volume IX.

for Black Spring
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/black-spring

Maxence Emery

Maxence Emery is a multifaceted author. A globetrotter and photographer, he photographed homeless people for Maximilien Le Roy's book Hosni. He met Alejandro González Raga in Madrid through Reporters Without Borders and decided to tell his powerful story of Cuba as a comic book, illustrated by Thomas Humeau.

Thomas Humeau

Thomas Humeau was born in 1987 in Angers, France, and studied art at the prestigious Estienne and Olivier de Serre, in Paris. He contributed to the collection 13m28 and published his first book, Desert Park, in 2010. He works in London for the creative agency Harriman Steel.

Edward Gauvin (translator)

A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, Edward Gauvin has translated in various fields from film to fiction, with a personal focus on contemporary comics (BD) and post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and World Literature Today, and twice placed in the British Comparative Literature Association’s John Dryden Translation Competition. It has also been shortlisted for several major awards—the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Translation Award—and twice nominated for French-American Foundation Translation Prize. He has received fellowships from the NEA, PEN America, the Fulbright program, and the Centre National du Livre, as well as residencies from Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, and the Belgian government. A multiple grantee of the French Voices program from the French Embassy, he is a frequent contributor to their cultural initiatives. As a translation advocate, he has written widely, spoken at universities and festivals, and taught at the Bread Loaf Translation Conference, where he will be returning (virtually) this summer. The translator of over 400 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.

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Links available online only

Meet the Creators

Alejandro González Raga (cropped). By European People's Party, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Meet journalist Alejandro González Raga, the narrator of this graphic memoir. González Raga was arrested and imprisoned during Cuba’s 2003 “Black Spring,” during which the Cuban government targeted journalists and dissidents. Learn what González Raga has been up to since his release from prison in an NPR story.

Speak French? Watch a news interview with author Maxence Emery, who shares more details of González Raga’s imprisonment, exile in Spain, and how the two writers met.

Meet Translator Edward Gauvin

From left to right: cover of "My Beijing"; portrait of translator Edward Gauvin; cover of "The Bodyguard Unit."

How did Edward Gauvin get his start as a translator? “Year abroad. Dumb luck. Decent taste.” Read about his journey into translation on the Smithsonian’s Book Dragon blog.

“Why is translation like the multiverse?” Look at a cartoon interview with Gauvin by the illustrator Jason Novak.

Read the Original

Cover of the original French publication of "Black Spring."

Read Printemps Noir in the original French on Google Books.

Hear the Names

Listen to pronunciations of the Spanish names and words in the story, read aloud by Lucía Montás.

Listen to Alejandro’s American Radio

What might Alejo have heard on the radio? Listen to snippets of a broadcast from WGBS, the radio station in Miami that Alejo tuned into from Cuba.

Then, hear songs from some of his favorite artists: The Mustangs, Charles Aznavour, and The Beatles.

The Hippie Movement in Cuba and Beyond

Who were the hippies and what were their beliefs? Find out in this documentary footage from 1968, which follows hippies in San Francisco.

Then, find out about the “mass secret cult” of hippies that developed in Cuba from the blog Translating Cuba.

The Cuban Revolution and its Aftermath

Fidel Castro (standing center) and his soldiers in the Sierra Maestra. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Read a timeline of the Cuban revolution, in which Fidel Castro and his allies overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista, from Al Jazeera.

Then, take a look at historical footage from Cuba, spanning from the Cuban Revolution to today, including the Bay of Pigs Invasion (0:39), the US embargo (0:54), and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1:04) (in Spanish).

Finally, watch a PBS video about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a standoff between the American and Soviet governments that occurred after the USSR decided to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. (Younger students might enjoy a shorter video from TED-Ed.)

You can also explore “13 Days in October,” an interactive timeline of the crisis, from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Marxism and Propaganda in Cuba

A billboard in Cuba depicting Che Guevara and the motto "Hasta la Victoria Siempre" (Until the Everlasting Victory Always). By Redthoreau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

See how “Marxist ideology” spread in Cuba by exploring a gallery of Cuban revolution propaganda posters, or an exhibition of propaganda posters from the 1970s (click on “Images”).

Political posters and billboards still play an important role in Cuba. Take a look at propaganda billboards from the past decade on a travel blog.

“Black Spring”?

Curious about this story’s title? It’s the name of the longer book based on the memories of Alejandro González Raga, or “Alejo,” as he is called in this section. As an adult, Alejandro González Raga was one of 75 independent journalists and dissidents who were arrested and jailed in Cuba’s “Black Spring” crackdown of 2003.

The last imprisoned journalist was freed in 2011, but the repression of free speech continued (also available in Spanish).

Background on Cuba

New to learning about Cuba? Read a country profile from National Geographic Kids. (The NG profile’s political coverage is a bit out of date, but this PDF report from Stanford has an update on US–Cuba relations on page 5.)

Finding unbiased media coverage of Cuba can often be tricky in the United States; find out why the US–Cuba relationship is so complex in “A Brief History of American and Cuba” from Vox. (This video is from 2016, when normalization between Cuba and the US seemed likely, but the deal ended under the Trump administration.)

Links available online only

More from Translator Edward Gauvin

Excerpt from Edward Gauvin's translation of "Crocodiles are Everywhere" by Juliette Boutant and Thomas Mathieu.

Browse through Edward Gauvin’s more than 50 translations on Words Without Borders. We especially recommend his translations of “The Pharaohs of Egypt” on WWB Campus, "Crocodiles are Everywhere" on WWB and his essay on having his own work translated.

Or, visit Gauvin's YouTube playlist of videos related to his work, including a reading of his translation of the story of a man who "sort of flies."

Finally, check out two of Gauvin’s full-length translations for young adults: My Beijing by Nie Jun, about a girl and her grandfather in China’s capital; and The Bodyguard Unit by Clément Xavier and Lisa Lugrin, about a group of “jujitsuffragettes” in 20th-century England.

Meet Che Guevara

Portrait of Che Guevara (1960). By Alberto Korda, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Get to know Che Guevara, the revolutionary that Alejandro’s friend mentions, in an article from the BBC.

Then, watch footage from Guevara’s famous “Patria o muerte” (homeland or death) speech at the United Nations.

Finally, check out a poem by Guevara’s son, Omar Pérez, on WWB Campus: “There is No Theorem (A Regguetón),” translated by Kristin Dykstra.

Censorship: A Worldwide Issue

A graph showing the rise of book titles targeted by censorship efforts in the US. © American Library Association.

Censorship occurs in many countries, to some degree or another. Below, you'll find examples from a few countries and links to information about many others.

Iran:

"An Iranian Metamorphosis," in which a single word in a children's cartoon gets a man thrown in prison
“Don’t Be a Stooge for the Regime—Iranians Reject State-Controlled Media!,” an essay in the Markaz Review about the Iranian press and internet both in Iran and abroad
The Committee to Protect Journalists' page for Iran, where you can find out how many journalists are currently in prison for their writing. (The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent not-for-profit human rights organization.)

Russia:

"My Grandmother, The Censor," a personal essay about Soviet-era censorship in Russia. (Journalist Masha Gessen, who wrote this essay and fled Russia for the US several years ago, was recently sentenced to prison in absentia in Russia for spreading “false information.”)
Read a New York Times interactive article about the Russian government’s crackdown on anti-war protests during their invasion of Ukraine.

Egypt:

Read a 2013 article in which Egyptian novelist Mansoura Ez-Eldin says that it is the “silence or self-censorship of creative people that actually threatens Arab creativity.”
Then, read an interview with formerly imprisoned writer Ahmed Naji in World Literature Today, or visit the Committee to Protect Journalists’ page for Egypt.

The US:

Read about the rise of book bans in both US schools and public libraries in the New York Times.
Browse the stories about US censorship at Columbia University's Knight Institute (newest stories at the bottom).
Find out which ten young adult and children's books are most often challenged or banned in the US.

Cuba: Speak Spanish? Read posts on Cuban censorship from the human rights organization Raga founded.

To find out about the state of free speech all over the world, visit the home page of the Committee to Protect Journalists. To read "underreported," often censored, stories from around the world, visit Global Voices and browse stories in Reporters Without Borders.

More Graphic Lit on Life and Politics

Illustration from "A Short Guide to Being the Perfect Political Refugee."

From Cuba:

Read an interview with cartoonist Edel Rodriguez, whose graphic memoir Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey describes his family’s exile from Castro-era Cuba and arrival in the US when he was a child.

From elsewhere:

“Two Million People in the Square” by Magdy El Shafee, graphic political pamphlets from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution (translated by Humphrey Davies)
“A Short Guide to Being the Perfect Political Refugee,” a satirical graphic piece by Mana Neyestani about the difficulties of applying for refugee status in France (translated by Ghazal Mosadeq)
“Tell Me Where to Go,” a Korean comic by Kim Han-min that imagines migration in a dystopian future (translated by Jamie Chang and Sora Kim-Russell)

More Visual History*

Illustration from "Grass."

On WWB Campus:

“Slaves of Moscow”: Graphic reportage about a case of modern-day slavery
“Grass”: A graphic oral history that begins with a girl’s childhood in Japan-occupied Korea
“A Drifting Life”: A comic creator’s memoir about growing up in Japan after WWII
“South of Alameda”: A graphic memoir about taking part in student protests in Chile (blog post with resources; posted on our sister site Words Without Borders)

Elsewhere:

Maus, by Art Spiegelman
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi (translated by Mattias Ripa)
The Arab of the Future, by Riad Sattouf (translated by Sam Taylor)

*For Teaching Idea 2

Reading Grade Level(s): 8, 9, 10 and up

Key Points
Launching the Story
1. Growing Up Under Authoritarianism
2. Visualizing History

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

Related Reading

Grass - Graphic Nonfiction

A Drifting Life - Graphic Nonfiction

My Story of Chess - Nonfiction