By GEORGE RUSSELL /EDITOR, LATIN AMERICA

rt director Edel Rodriguez and TIME got together early. Now 26, Rodriguez was only eight years old when he first spent time with correspondent Richard Woodbury, at present our Denver bureau chief but at the time operating from Miami. Their trip together appeared as a story in our issue dated May 12, 1980.

It was no ordinary journey: Edel, his parents and sister Irma, plus 24 of his other relatives, were ferried out of Mariel, Cuba, on a 68-ft. shrimper called Nature Boy, headed for Key West, Florida. The overnight trip was hastily arranged by relatives in Florida after Fidel Castro announced that Cubans were free to leave if their relatives would provide transportation. About 129,000 Cubans left the country.

The extended Rodriguez family shared the deck with 50 others, some criminals that Castro had released. They were accompanied by Woodbury and free-lance photographer Mario Ruiz, who snapped the picture, above, of Edel--in the red coat--and his family.

The Rodriguezes settled in Hialeah, a section of Miami, where Edel, who spoke no English when he arrived, found that art was "a way to get attention." After winning numerous awards in high school (including a TIME-sponsored scholarship), Edel attended New York City's Pratt Institute, where he concentrated on painting. When he left school, though, he wanted to be an art director. Where else but TIME? He joined the staff in 1994 as a designer. That was how he once again came to know Ruiz, still a photographer for the magazine. Some casual chitchat led to the discovery of three rolls of film Ruiz had shot aboard Nature Boy.

Rodriguez has returned to Cuba twice, in 1994 and 1996. "It was pretty emotional," he recalls, and seeing it through Americanized eyes was shocking. "I don't think it had changed much," he says, "but I had." His Cuban sensibility, however, heavily inflects our Latin American edition. "I think a lot about color," he says. "I see things as bright and energetic." Just like himself.