¶ Intro / Opening
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
The people I'm talking to in Cuba are suffering terribly. Blackout's twenty twenty two hours a day. A country can't survive like that. People just want to live, right.
Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize winning historian of Cuba and America. It feels like a heavy weight to carry.
My coming here meant that I had opportunities I would have never had had I stayed in Cuba. At the heart of the book is a profound sense of guilt that my mother brought me with her to this country. She left behind my brother. He had trauma. I had a loving mother.
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. We're not even halfway through the year, and it has been such a dramatic one in world affairs. Venezuela, Greenland, Iran Lebanon that I wouldn't blame you if the extent of Cuba's crisis hadn't fully registered. But the island really
is in a deep crisis. The oil that used to come in from Venezuela stopped in January after the US removed its leader, and then the oil that used to come from Mexico, stopped because its government didn't want to risk President Trump's wrath. So that means today people in Cuba are desperate, and like many Cuban Americans, historian Ada
Ferrer is worried about family and friends in Cuba. But for her, the present is part of a long history between Cuba and the United States, one that she's studied, one that has shaped her own family, as she reveals in a new book called Keeper of My Kin. So this conversation is in part personal but also takes in the political picture. Marco Rubio, another Cuban American, comes up. And when you turn to the written version of this, as I hope you do at Bloomberg dot com forward
slash Michelle, you'll see my notes and reflections. So the Bay of Pigs, the Mariel boatlift, Alligator, Alcatraz, Cuba, and American politics, it's all there. But here's how we began. When Ada Ferrer dialed in from her university studio at Princeton, doctor Ferrer, it's Michelle. Can you hear me, Yes, I can hear you. Thank you so much for joining us. I can't tell you how happy I am to be speaking to you because I found your book really resonant.
I learned so much from it, and therefore I just want to think, thank you not only for being part of this conversation, but really for writing it, because I think it's an incredible historical record.
Well, thank you for reading the book.
Essentially, Keeper of My Kin was my introduction to your earlier book, and I think it's this really unusual combination of it being incredibly timely with everything that's happened this year, but also kind of timeless, which is I think, in a pretty immense achievement.
¶ Writing "Keeper of my Kin"
You know, there's a part of me that knew that I would always have to write this book, that it was part of my story, part of my family story, part of Cuba's story, part of an American story. I didn't know when I started writing it that as I wrote it would become more relevant because of basically US
immigration policy and what's happening with deportations of Cubans. And then by the time I had finished the book and it was in production, then there's a whole new kind of timeliness with what's been happening in Cuba since the attack on Venezuela.
Yeah, I think the stage is set for your next book, really, and I do want to bring us right up to the present day. But i'd love you to start by helping us understand your relationship with Cuba. And I think you've hinted at it already there. There's a line in
¶ A love-hate relationship with Cuba
Keeper of my Kin where you write that Cuba is the place that you were taught by your family to both love and hate, right, Can you deconstruct that for us?
Yeah?
Well, I was born in Cuba, so that's the beginning of the relationship. But I left when I was ten months, or I was taken when I was ten months, which means that I had no memory of it at all. So my introduction to Cuba was via other people, via mostly my parents, but also neighbors and community, and in that community and in my family, there was an intense love for the place and intense nostalgia about the place
for a long time, and intense desire to return. At the same time, there was profound disagreement with the government of Cuba, and so that made it a complicated place. You know, you could love the place but not the government, the people but not the leaders, So that was part of it. The other thing is that you know, like any American teenager, when your parents keep talking about something and keep trying to get you to like it and value it, there's a part of you that always resists.
Right.
So, whenever they compared the US to Cuba and oh, everything was so much better in Cuba, or in Cuba, we didn't do that in Cuba. You would have never been able to do that, all my sister and I could say was you're not in Cuba anymore. Right, So there was as a good American teenager, I kind of learned to be a little skeptical of everything my parents said.
¶ The Cuba of Castro
But also it's kind of extraordinary that they're saying that to you, because in no way do they want to live in the Cuba of Castro. They've made a very distinct choice to leave it behind.
Right exactly.
So, I think you know, their assumption, as with many people who left early on, and it was a plausible assumption in that time and place, right the height of the Cold War, the US ninety miles away as it continues to be now. Their assumption, and also the US with a history of a long, long history of intervention in Cuba, they really assumed that the Castro government wouldn't last. There had been the Bay of Pigs in nineteen sixty one, in which the US invaded Cuba using Cuban exiles, and
the US was defeated. But even then people really thought that there would probably be another invasion, that a next invasion would not be as badly organized as that one, or they just or they thought Fidel would fall of his own accord, So their assumption was that they would return.
When my father left in nineteen sixty two, my mother was pregnant with me, so he left a year before we did, and he really thought it would be a matter of months, maybe a year, And then my mother thought the same thing when we left.
So this journey that defines your life, really leaving as a babe in your mother's arms, aged ten months in nineteen sixty three. I guess you know that story because your mother told it to you, right, So how was it described to you as a child, and how did you fill in the blanks later on?
Well, my mother was always a storyteller.
¶ Leaving Cuba in 1963
She'd loved telling stories, and she even loved, you know, adding music to her stories and snatches of songs and so on. So the story she told was a story of the two of us making this incredible, irreversible, it turns out, journey together and we were partners. She suffered, she struggled, she'd never left the country, she was wearing heels. Yeah, I was heavy in her arms. She didn't know what she was doing. The people who were going to pick us up weren't there. It was just one mishap in
hardship after another. But I was always there and I was good and I behaved and we got here, and eventually we got to my father in New York on July fourth, of all dates, nineteen sixty three. And she always said, you recognized him, your arms to him to be held by him, even though you hadn't met him yet. She always repeated that part. So it was a beautiful story in a way of where she struggled, she was scared. My presence helped her, and we survived and we made it.
¶ Leaving her brother Poly behind
But when she told that kind of ritual eyed story, she left something out, and that was that we had left my brother behind. She left behind a nine and a half year old son who was her son from a first marriage, and my brother, Bully, my half brother. His father did not let him leave, would not give my mother permission to take him. And so when she told the beautiful, ritual eyed story of the two of
us against the world, she left that part out. You know, even then it made no sense because I always knew my brother was in Cuba. I always knew he was there. I always knew the goal was reunification as soon as possible. We talked about him all the time, you know, with his picture was in the house. I used to kiss his picture at night, you know, that kind of thing. So that part of the story was hugely important, but not treated quite the same way as the other part
of the story. And then as I got older, even as a teenager, starting to resist kind of the imposition of their Cuban nostalgia, I just started to become more more interested. And in nineteen seventy seven, the four of us, my parents, my sister, and I were sitting in the living room watching Barbara Walters interview for Del Castro, and before he came on, there were scenes of Havana, you know, of the maligon and the lighthouse and the streets and the cars and so on, and I looked at it
and just started crying. And I would have been fifteen at the time, and my parents just couldn't believe it. You know, the nostalgia and the pain had always been theirs. You know, why was I crying? And I remember so clearly saying to them, I'm crying because I was born there, but I can't remember it. And I think in a
way that started something. That feeling started something for me, and I became more interested in understanding it and in understanding it in my own terms as well, not just as a place for their nostalgia.
Your brother, Polly is right there on the cover of your book. It's the three of you in a picture that's taken just before you leave Cuba, or on his birthday, I think, a few months before you leave Cuba with your mother. I think the key bit of detail that you discovered years later was that he didn't know that you and your mother were leaving for the United States. That he was out playing with his friends and he came back and he was told you were just gone for a while.
So when we left, my mother didn't say goodbye. He didn't know that we were leaving. And I blocked out when exactly I learned that, But I believe it was either in high school or in college, or maybe even after college, when I first went back to Cuba in nineteen ninety and met my aunt, who was one of the ones who raised him. But yeah, my mother, in consultation with her own mother and in consultation with her sisters, decided that it would be easier on everyone involved for
us to leave without her saying goodbye. When I learned that, it shocked me, It hurt me, It crushed me a little bit.
It was a different moment. They didn't think about.
Psychology, maybe in the same way we think about it today. They didn't think about trauma in the same way we think about it today. And above all, they thought it would be temporary, so they thought the effect of it could be reversed quickly. But it wasn't for a long time. So, yes, he was outside playing with friends, and we left, and then he came back for dinner, and my grandmother told him that we had gone to the countryside to help with an ailing relative.
And I know that he.
Learned before the week was out that we had left, because he sat down and wrote a letter to my mother about five days after we left.
¶ Letters from Poly
May the fourth, nineteen sixty three, is I think the date on that letter, And you have the letters in your book, and it's I mean, they are They are heartbreaking, worse almost as the years go on as he grows up, because I think it's sixteen years until he sees your mother again, but he doesn't get to the US until he is twenty six.
That's right.
First of all, let me just say that I didn't know those letters existed. I found them after both my parents had died, when I was cleaning out their apartment, and they begin, as you said, May fourth, nineteen sixty three, and they go through nineteen seventy nine. So they are chronicle of his life without us, but they're excruciating to read. You see him over the years becoming more more traumatized as a young man, struggling with staying in school, struggling
with keeping a job. And then my mother visits him in nineteen seventy nine, when Fidel Castro decides that Cubans who left can come back and visit family, and so my mother went back to see him. By then her own mother had already died, and so that was nineteen seventy nine, and then the following year, nineteen eighty, you get a major historical event, something called the Mariel boat Lift, in which one hundred and twenty five thousand Cubans leave by sea in the space of a few months. And
my brother left. My mother actually went to get him. She took a bus down to Florida, and we were living in New Jersey, and she rented out a space on a little boat and paid the captain to take her to Mariel. I was about to turn eighteen and about to leave for college at the end of that summer.
Yeah, and I know he didn't have an easy life in the US, and I should say that he has passed away, as have both of your parents. So and I guess that's part of what allows you to write a book as personal as this, Because I was so struck by the letters. I'm just going to read a few lines out because I think that for anyone yet to read your book, they give an idea of the depth of the heartache and what it means to be
separated as a child. So early on that first letter, he says, I want to speak with my father so he can give me permission to go with you. But he's telling your mother that he's being a good boy, And then he says how much he wants to go to New York, and then by the time he's nineteen twenty, he's saying, my heart neither measures nor marks time, and later he writes, you have to understand that my life
is full of the great trauma I've suffered. It's a life spent waiting in many ways, right, waiting to arrive in the US, like waiting for that country, as much as it is to be reunited with your mother, I imagine.
Yeah, I think that that's such a great way to put it. And the thing is, you know, you've you can't really live a life waiting. So things didn't matter in the present for him because it would all be erased, you know, by his reunification with my mother.
Right, So he didn't work exactly, So.
These things are not worth doing in Cuba.
Yeah, they don't count because my real life will begin when I'm with my mother in the US.
And yeah, so it's a terrible, terrible story.
Ada, tell us how it fits into the wider story of Cuban Americans and perhaps even Cuba and the United States, because I mean, you're writing from your own personal experience in your families, But would there be many stories of this kind of separation within families, of this longing to get to the US, of this complicated relationship. Oh.
Absolutely.
¶ Cuba's history of migration
I think that the question of migration to the US is central to the history of Cuba. I know it was in some sense in the nineteenth century, but especially since nineteen fifty nine. You had multiple waves of migration. Early on, you had a group of people that history has termed the Golden Exiles. They tended to be more elite, they tended to think of themselves as exiles who would return,
and so on. Then later you had something called the Freedom Flights, which lasted from you know, mid nineteen sixties to early nineteen seventies. You had three hundred thousand people leave. Then you had the Mario boat Lift one hundred and twenty five thousand people leave. You had the ninety four Rafter Crisis, in which about thirty five thousand people leave. So there's been multiple, multiple waves of migration, and if anything,
that's accelerated since the nineteen nineties. So it's a major part of the story of Miami, certainly in a Florida, but I think it's also a major part of Cuba. You know, the idea that one could leave, or the idea that a family member would leave, or a friend or a neighbor. It just became part of the texture of daily life. I remember finding in an archived once someone writing a letter to a friend in the US saying,
I'm just tired. I can't get anything done because my day is constantly interrupted by people coming to say goodbye because they're leaving. Right, So that becomes a part of the story of the Cuban Revolution itself, right, the possibility of leaving, the possibility of being left, and right now, if we can bring it to the present. Over the last five to ten years, Cuba has lost about twenty percent of its population. It's a massive exodus, the biggest
one in Cuban history. There's always pain and heartache there. Right, it's not easy leaving family behind, and then they try to help as much as they can, which is why remittances are one of the major sources of income in Cuba.
Right, And is this part of your life still that you worry about family who remain in Cuba, and people like you try and figure out ways to still support them.
Oh, absolutely, there's no question about that. My mother died
¶ Helping family in Cuba
in twenty twenty, but she was always thinking about what would happen when she died. In twenty fourteen, she wrote a letter that she hoped my sister and I would find after she died. And in that letter, she reminded me, be sure to send money to Danina. Send her this much money and she will divide it up in this way among these three people. You can send it by calling this man in Hialia and he will charge you this month. So she left specific instructions on what months
of the year to do it. By the time my mother died, my aunt in Cuba, who I was supposed to send the money to, had already died, So it was kind of a moot point. But even the fact that she told me that it stayed with me always. So's I'm always calling relatives in Cuba or calling them through other relatives here, and yeah, trying to help in any way I can. And sometimes that means traveling to
Cuba and taking things they need. Sometimes that means helping them get medicine through pharmacy in Miami, that's in medicine to Cuba, or even through connections in other places. Anyway, people do all kinds of things to help their relatives in Cuba.
It feels like a heavy weight to carry. Obviously, what those in Cuba are going through that's the most immense. But for you too to feel that contrast between their lives and.
Yours, yeah, I think that's a lot of it. You know.
At the heart of the book is a profound sense of guilt. Right that my mother brought me with her to this country. She left behind my brother. He had trauma. I had a loving mother. I had opportunities here that he never had. There, even when I became a historian of Cuba and began traveling to Cuba, I could do that. I could get the visas, I could get the paperwork necessary, I could stay in places in Havana where I had easy access to food because I had dollars, et cetera,
et cetera. Meanwhile, he came to the US and ran into all kinds of trouble, eventually became undocumented. After the fact, he could never return to Cuba. So even in that I had privileges that he didn't, So all along there's this guilt at what I had that he didn't have. But then it's a guilt that transfers in a sense to more than just my brother. Right to the place in general, to my family in general. So yes, I talked to them. I talked to relatives regularly. I think about them all the time.
Do you wake up to messages from them? Is that how your day begins? Now?
I don't wake up to messages every day, but I often, and sometimes it's multiple messages from different people. So I'll have a cousin who's in the hospital and needs help, and his daughter's trying to get the medicine from the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, a relative who is about to leave Cuba for Spain because people continue leaving and those it's much harder, obviously to come to the US now, but there are people who have access to Spain by other means.
So a message from him about something going on, a message from another relative whose nephew is in Alligator Alcatraz here in the US.
I mean, it's just not.
Every day, and I don't begrudge any of them, right, It's what they do.
And I'm here.
Part of me thinks that I'm continuing kind of a legacy of my mother.
She always had that role.
She was working poor and then retired poor in Miami Beach, but still with her tiny pension. She sent like one hundred and fifty dollars every three months, which is nothing really, but it's what she could do. So I think of it partly as continuing her legacy and just doing what I can.
So then to the present moment, DA and the situation since January when the oil that used to come from Venezuela no longer came after Maduro was captured. Amidst all of this, there is a process of negotiation that's underway with the US. What do you think is going on?
You know, I wish I could say where it was heading, and I wish I could say it was heading somewhere positive. I'm not able to do that. With Donald Trump in charge of US policy in Cuba, it's hard to predict anything, right because he can say something one day and then change his mind a week later. So there's that level of uncertainty. But also here's what I can say. The
¶ People in Cuba are "suffering"
people I'm talking to in Cuba are suffering terribly right now. Even the Cuban government announced that they were completely out of oil. That blackouts even in Havanah, where they tend to be less severe than in the countryside or in the interior. The blackouts are going to be of twenty twenty two hours a day, right. A country can't survive like that. People can't survive like that. So my sense is that something has to change. But the way I see it, both sides are just stuck in these old
scripts they've had for a long time. Cuba basically says no negotiation, even though they have to be negotiating, and we know that because John Ratcliffe was just there right then. Meanwhile, Trump speaks in a way that doubles down on a kind of really crude American imperialism that's reminiscent of the
turn of the twentieth century. And what gets lost in all that is that people just want to live, right, And I don't have any confidence right now that that is the priority of either side involved than the negotiations.
¶ A threat to US national security?
Do you think that Cuba is a threat to the national security of the United States? That's the central line that's put forward by the Trump administration.
No, I don't think. No.
They don't have electricity, they don't have power. What threat can a country that's on the verge of collapse be to the US? And also, I mean, yes, the relations with China, with Russia, but certainly those are not new, and they've had those relations at times where it was
much more dangerous for those relations to exist. So I don't think there's any particular threat now, though of course I don't have access to all the information they do, but I can't imagine it would be a particular threat now that would justify the level of hardship being imposed on the Cuban people. We haven't told me just say, Can I just add categorically that the oil embargo is
cruel and unjust. It's collective punishment. It's killing people that you know, hospitals can't run incubators or dialysis machines, there's no fuel for ambulances to get to hospitals. I mean, it's just a It's a humanitarian disaster that's very likely to get a lot worse very quickly.
I've read the letter that you put in the New York Times, and it's an open letter to the President of Cuba, reminiscent of the ones that you saw your father right to Fidel Castro, where you point out where he also shoulders the blame for the situation in Cuba.
Yeah, the way the Cuban government responds to all this is just and it's the way they've responded to the US for more than sixty years, which is to say that the troubles in Cuba, the hardships in Cuba, are all the fault of the US and the US embargo. Now, the US embargo is terrible. I don't support it as policy. I don't support the oil embargo as policy. So what they're saying is partly true, but it doesn't explain everything
in Cuba. It doesn't explain the levels of repression, it doesn't explain terrible economic decisions that have been made over the last decades, and especially over the last two decades. So I think it's just insufficient. And in order for something to change peacefully in Cuba, which is what I most want, right, I want life to get better for the Cuban people. So in order for something to change in Cuba and to change peacefully, I think they need
to kind of move beyond that really tired line. They need to say, Okay, things are horrible, Yes, the US embargo is terrible, but what can we do and what do our people want? The thing I called for at the end of the letter was a national dialogue, and even that the Cuban government can't talk about a national dialogue without bringing in the US as an impediment.
¶ A shared experience with Rubio
There is one person in the administration who knows the story of Cuba in the way you do, and that's Marc Rubio, who I grew up hearing stories of Cuba from his grandfather. He was filled with a sense of the country that his family left behind. He would understand your story perfectly, wouldn't he, even if politically his instincts are different from yours.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's something we share, which is having grown up with that sense of pain and loss and nostalgia. But I do think our stories are different in that I went to Cuba. I've been going to Cuba since nineteen ninety. I don't go to Cuba as an act of political solidarity with the Cuban government. That's never ever been the purpose of my trip. I go to do historical research and to produce history books
about Cuba. I go to see my family, and that means that not to insult him or anything, but it means that I have an understanding, or more certainly more of an understanding, I think, than he does, of what it is like to be there and what it is like to talk to people, ordinary people who live there.
And sometimes in Miami people think and talk about Cuba in a way that demonizes people there, that imagines that, you know, and I've heard this kind of language that communism destroys everything, and they don't think about the way life goes on, the way that people make their lives, the way that people have just ordinary human needs for connection. And I think that's what's missing in his perspective, that
there isn't that firsthand experience of the place. He knows the Cuba that his parents and grandparents talked about, and he knows the Cuba that he's learned about through his research as a senator and then as as Secretary of State. But I don't think he has experience on the ground that would lead him maybe to be more flexible and more realistic.
Can you deconstruct something first, which is the revolution itself? Your book, Cuba and American History, goes back much earlier than that to the ways that the US. I mean, there was a slogan wasn't there by Cuba, which existed way back in the nineteenth century. But the revolution that brought Castro to power a few years before your parents left Cuba. Was it a communist revolution at the beginning.
No, it became a communist revolution, but it was not in the beginning. In the years leading up to nineteen fifty nine and Castro's victory, it was a movement meant to oust the dictator for Hinsy Batista. It was a movement to restore the nineteen forty constitution which Batista's coup had nullified. It was a movement against corruption and government.
It was all those things. In Castro's public speaking and public pronouncements on the revolution before he came to power, he talked about things like land reform, giving land to landless peasants, increasing opportunities for education, things like that. But those things were a part of progressive political discourse in Cuba for decades.
And in many parts of the world at that time, exactly in the age of colonialism and empire plans to announce.
Yes, there was never any mention of a socialist organization of the economy. There was not even anything publicly that would suggest a major break with the United States. So all that developed in the first years of revolution, and it was a you know, I think a fascinating dynamic in which the revolutionary government would do something, and then the US would respond, and with each encounter of US
and Cuban policy, the stakes got higher and higher. You had the Bay of Pigs in April nineteen sixty one, and it was on the eve of that that Castro first announced the revolution was socialist.
I'm struck by the intensity of time. Castro comes to power in nineteen fifty nine and within three years Cuba is a front line in the Cold War, where the standoff over the Cuban missile crisis between Kennedy and Krushchov makes the world confront the possibility of nuclear war.
Yeah, and it was a real possibility.
I think, you know, it's been so long since it happened that people forget that sometimes that the world did almost come to the brink of armageddon. So I think the idea of intense time is fantastic. I think that's what it was live like at the time. And when you read things from nineteen fifty nine, people at the time were even saying that, you know, we've wasted a lot of time. We have to accelerate time, we have to get a lot done. There was a sense of
euphoria in the beginning. I mean historians sometimes call it revolutionary time, something that kind of is a very intense, kind of sped up time, and I think that describes it perfectly.
I want to again bring us back to the present and two things. One about the recent arrivals from Cuba and how they are finding themselves targeted by the administration's drive to deport What is the impact of that. How much do you think it could change Republican politics in a place like Florida.
¶ Cuban-Americans and Trump
This administration's policy regarding immigration, I think has been cruel and unjust, and Cubans are not accepted from that. A lot of Cubans in Miami and South Florida voted for Trump understanding that his intention was to deport people. They never thought those deportations would apply to Cubans. They thought it would apply to other people because Cubans have always
had an advantage in the US. There's something passed by Lyndon Johnson's administration, the Cuban Adjustment Act, which basically gave Cubans a welcome no other immigrants had. It gave them a fast track to residency and then to citizenship. That is still the law of the land. So Cubans assumed that whatever happened generally with deportation would not apply to them because of the Cuban Adjustment Act. But in practice, the Cuban Adjustment Act is not being observed, so Cubans
are being detained. They show up for regular immigration check ins and they're being detained. They show up for asylum hearings and judges dismiss their cases, which means that they're eligible for deportation. I think it will change. It may change Cuban American attitudes towards Trump. It made him definitely less popular. People I talked to in Miami see it, you hear it. I know it from relatives who are Republicans who voted for him, who are very unhappy with
the immigration policies. So I do think it has a potential to make a real impact in voting practices. The question is what will happen in Cuba, Because if something were to change in Cuba and the communist government were to fall, and people in Miami attribute that to Trump's policy, then that might erase some of the fallen popularity.
¶ Obama's visit to Cuba
You saw, didn't you that moment of hope of a reset in relations when President Obama visited Cuba and it looked like the US was into a new era. What are you looking for now? That does give you hope amidst all this, it's.
A combination of hope and fear at the same time, I feel like I can't separate them. The fact that things have gotten so bad means that there is maybe more opportunity for change right now. But at the same time, the reason that exists is because things are absolutely, you know, unsustainable in Cuba, which never makes me feel good. Right So I hope that both sides can figure out a way to negotiate and arrive at a place that makes room for Cuban people to live more fully. Right now,
it doesn't feel like they're living. It feels like they're barely hanging on. They're barely surviving, and even survival right now is an open question. So if there's a way that they can arrive at a peaceful change, that would be great. But you know, again, I don't know how hopeful I am that that will happen, and I do fear all kinds of things.
And is that the case, especially because you know the history, you know how over generations, over two centuries, the question of how Cuba should or will relate to the United States has been so complicated. Yeah, the USA has wanted Cuba in one way or another for so long.
Right, And US intervention in Cuba has never ended well, and it has produced conditions and resentments that then feed other movements. So I'm just hoping that people in the administration aren't thinking that this will kind of be an easy when and then it's over, right, Because for one thing, it won't be over. The story continues even when people talk about Cuba collapsing that what does that mean? Trump
will say Cuba will collapse any minute. But when something collapses, whatever that is, it still continues to exist, and the collapse continues to unfold and get worse and worse perhaps, right.
And that's the other thing I'm worried about because as a scholar of Cuban history, I know that when there have been political transitions, when unpopular governments have been deposed, there has often been violence, and I do worry about that, about reprisals and retribution that may bring really unintended consequences.
So there are these two countries that are part of your life, Cuba and the United States. I want to close by talking about you and your life now and how you how those two countries coexist in your life, because it's clear from reading this book that your daughters have inherited this attachment to Cuba, like the way that your mother passed it on to you. You've given it to your daughters, right, unintentionally intentionally? I don't know, no, not really, It wasn't intentional. I mean they grew up
seeing my mother. They grew up knowing that I worked on Cuban history. I would go to Cuba to do research, and sometimes I would take them with me. My older daughter played Hide and Seek one summer in the provincial archive in the city of San Fuego's right, So it's always been a part of their life. But I'm surprised actually at how much they're interested in it, and I'm pleased by it. I don't think it's an obsession with them quite in the same way it was with me.
I don't think they'll make it their life's work, I think, but but they are.
They do feel an emotional attachment to it that I think, you know I put there unintentionally, but also that my parents did.
¶ Calling myself an American
And did it take you a while to call yourself American? Yeah? I think you grew up thinking yourself as Cuban, Like, how does that transition happen? Because I think you grew up in a very Cuban community and college at Vasaiza is a key moment of you discovering a wider world.
Right, Yeah, Now, everyone I grew up with thought of themselves as Cuban and sometimes I'll call myself Cuban American.
But yeah, no, I think it's it wasn't.
I think until I had children of my own and began traveling with them outside the US that I began to think of myself as American. In the last line of the book, I call myself an American woman, and that's the first time I've ever written it so explicitly, Like.
That, your father, when he's dying, you thank him, don't you? For bringing you to the United States. It was his departure that made yours possible. But I felt like you hadn't really seen that as a moment to spot gratitude until you're there in his last hours and days.
Yeah, it just felt I wanted to say that to him before he died because I realized that my coming here or they're bringing me here meant that you know that I had opportunities I would have never had had I stayed in Cuba. And also there's the idea that even if I had stayed in Cuba, maybe I would have left later, Maybe I'd be part of this major exodus over the last years that ended up coming into the at the US Mexico border. Right, Who knows what
would have happened. I owe everything to them, And it's also curious that in some sense it's their having brought me here is partly what allowed for my re encounter or embraced with Cuba itself. If I had stayed in Cuba, I might not be that interested in Cuba.
Yeah, it's true you've had that distance and that connection.
¶ The books is a "testament of love"
Do you think that they would have struggled with your book if they were still alive to read it, that they would have found it too personal or too raw?
I could have never written it if they were alive. Actually, I'm not sure that's true. I could have never written the book if my brother was alive. I struggle with that question a lot now that it's coming out right, what they would think if they were to read it. Of course, they couldn't read it unless it was in Spanish, So hopefully it'll be in Spanish someday. I think that they would understand that the book is a testament of love for them, a testament of love for this place
called Cuba. So I think they would understand that. Would they be pleased with every detail I shared? Maybe not, But my sister tells me that my mother would love the fact that she's on the cover of a.
Book, and she probably would be.
Yeah, it's a gorgeous picture. She's smiling, she's holding you in her arms. Her oldest son, Polly is right there beside her. Ada Ferrera, thank you, thank you for enlightening me, along with so many others.
Well, thanks thanks for having me, and thanks for reading the book.
And that's where we left things. That book cover picture, by the way, is one of the photos in the illustrated written version of this conversation, which you'll find at Bloomberg dot com. Forward slash Michell. This time, the added context in the notes I've put there include how US pressure on the Cuban leadership has become even greater since Ada Ferer and I spoke with a murder indictment against Raoul Castro, and so to the team. The producers are
Jessica Beck and Chris MARTINU. Guest booking is by Elan Bird. Our video producer is Andy Haywood. Social media is by Alex Morgan. Audio mixing was by Richard Ward. Our music is by Bart Walshaw and Jennifer Seeley is our production assistant. Special thanks this week go to John Cappuccino, who looks after Princeton's studio. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis and at Bloomberg. Thanks also to Brendan Francis Nunam and our executive editor Catherine Bell. Till the next time, good bye,