About Ada Ferrer
Ada Ferrer is a Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995.
Born in Cuba and raised in the US, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island regularly since 1990.
Where to find Ada
Cuba: An American History
An epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba.
In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more.
Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an ambitious and moving chronicle written for a moment that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade.
Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This, then, is a story that will give American readers unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba.
Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.
When Barack Obama met Raúl Castro, in an attempt to re-forge friendship, he stressed continuities that bind Cuba and the U.S. His claim that the same ideals inspired both can probably be dismissed as rhetoric. He surely spoke from the heart, however, when he averred, with only a little exaggeration, that “like the United States the Cuban people can trace their heritage both to slaves and slave-owners.”
The most conspicuous links between the two countries, however, have been political and paradoxical: Cuba has spent its entire existence as a state and much of its late colonial past in Uncle Sam’s purported backyard, threatened with annexation or subject to domination, economic exploitation or enmity. On the other hand the U.S. has harbored most of the exiles who conspired and fought for what Hugh Thomas, in the best history of the island, called Cuba’s “pursuit of freedom.” As in much of the Americas, the U.S. in Cuba has been a benign example and a malignant master. Ada Ferrer’s “Cuba: An American History” focuses on the equivocal relationship of the two countries, and presents it convincingly as symbiotic.
Early American politicans’ designs on Cuba seem “strange” in retrospect, writes Ms. Ferrer, a professor of history at New York University. Yet annexation might well have succeeded. Before 1861, submission to the U.S. was the best bet that wealthy Cubans had for prosperity: It promised to prolong slavery, which Spain had formally abolished but which had continued, protected by inertia and graft. Annexation might also have mitigated competition from Louisiana’s sugar industry. It would also have brought free trade with the island’s biggest market and source of supply.
In the 19th century, U.S. governments repeatedly offered to buy Cuba. Some sought to seize it. By the time the U.S. adopted the role of successor-empire to Spain’s in 1898, the best chance had gone: Slavery had vanished, thanks to economic change rather than political will; Louisianan sugar never recovered from the Civil War; and the long struggles against Spain had given Cuban elites a taste for independence. So, in the great lurch of U.S. imperialism that overleapt Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal zone and the Virgin Islands, “that infernal little Cuban republic” (as Teddy Roosevelt called it) escaped, like a minnow from between the gaps in Leviathan’s dentures.
The jaws stayed menacingly open. The U.S. kept its Guantánamo base and imposed a settlement that conferred a right—formally, an obligation—to intervene, in effect, at will. This was a prerogative, as Ms. Ferrer says, “to exercise permanent, indirect rule.” Foreigners took over most rural property and almost the entire sugar industry. The arrangement favored corrupt and sometimes criminal elites.
This was most glaring in the 1950s, the era of Mambo italiano, when the Mafia ran the island. While U.S. settlers held “church bake sales and youth dances,” Ms. Ferrer tells us, there were 338 brothels in Havana. In 1952 Fulgencio Batista seized Cuba in a coup and ruled it as a fief. Seven years later, in revulsion from U.S. tutelage, Cubans welcomed Fidel Castro from the “mountain kingdom,” where he ruled as theatrically as the Bandolero.
The revolution he instigated shed scores of thousands of exiles and refugees. But his regime proved impossible to dislodge, despite its economic incompetence and prolix rhetoric. Castro was agile in exploiting the Cold War to frustrate the CIA and the Cuban irreconcilables. When the Cold War ended, Ms. Ferrer argues, he responded with pragmatism worthy of Batista. Abandoning the utopian dream of “new people . . . with none of the old defects,” he made a virtue of reversion to former ways, internally re-projecting the country’s playground image from before the revolution, and justifying the multiplication of brothels with the wry claim that Cuba’s prostitutes were the world’s best. Cuba remained mired in “monoculture and dependency.”
Ms. Ferrer sets this story inside a brisk outline of Cuban history since Columbus. It was probably a mistake to adopt such a longue durée. Ms. Ferrer realizes, as Hugh Thomas did, that the features that shaped modern Cuba, and that linger in their effects, started in 1762. The British invasion of that year really did revolutionize the island by hugely augmenting the slave population, inaugurating an era of dependency on cane sugar, and solidifying the relationship with North American markets. But the preceding period is largely irrelevant to Ms. Ferrer’s theme of Cuban-U.S. relations, and her knowledge of it is flimsy.
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The book opens with a lamentable howler: An engraving from an early version of Columbus’s first report is labeled “Christopher Columbus going ashore,” whereas it illustrates his claims that oriental merchants traded with the people of Hispaniola. From the late 18th century, however, the narrative becomes both reliable and readable, albeit hurried. More would be welcome. In the context of slave rebellions, there is much on Haiti, but no mention of Surinam. Ms. Ferrer’s belief in the “Williams thesis”—the claim by the former leader of Trinidad that slavery fed industrialization—would benefit from more scrutiny. The fast pace bypasses much that is relevant: Readers do not here that there were more schools under Spanish than U.S. rule, from 1898 to 1902, or that zarzuela, poetry and song helped shape or express generous notions about race—showing, as the great black poet Nicolás Guillén put it, that “the spirit of Cuba is mestizo.”
Ms. Ferrer correctly rejects the notion that Cuba was ever an Eden of racial equality: The “Negro rebellion” of 1912, she says, “gave the lie to the vision of a Cuba somehow above or beyond racism,” but she might have found space for the influence of sociology—especially in the writings of Fernando Ortiz, who convinced Cubans of the depth and value of blacks’ contributions to a common culture. Ms. Ferrer’s coverage of exiles is excellent, but readers are bound to wonder why exile was a route to power under Valeriano Weyler, “the butcher,” but not under Fidel Castro.
On the Castro era, Ms. Ferrer’s pages are exemplary—full of plausible detail, lively insights, and lucid prose. Her personal recollections of the starving time, when Russia cancelled Castro’s subsidies, are graphic: She lost 10 pounds in Havana in 1992, “even with access to hard currency,” while Cubans “made soap out of pork fat” and “raised pigs in bathtubs.” During the Bay of Pigs crisis, she tells us, “at Havana’s Blanquita theater, then the largest in the world and soon to be renamed Karl Marx, my mother found my father, who was among the five thousand held there.”
The author’s involvement in her story makes her objectivity remarkable. She captures the character of the failure of the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba: vitiated first by intervention designed to frustrate—not promote—Cuban freedom, then by Americans’ “disparaging Cubans for their racial laxness,” then by bafflement at Cuban “ingratitude,” and finally by incomprehension in the face of Castro’s contempt. The “struggle,” she concludes, “between American power and Cuban sovereignty” revealed the United States as “not an empire for liberty . . . but just an empire.” By being equally severe with Cuban leaders and U.S. leaders, Ms. Ferrer achieves an honorable objective: pleasing nobody by being just.