A Family Divided by History

Historian Ada Ferrer left Cuba at ten months old, carried in her mother's arms in 1963. She has no memory of the island. Yet Cuba has shaped her entire life—her scholarship, her family relationships, and a persistent guilt she describes as "a heavy weight to carry." In her new book Keeper of My Kin, Ferrer weaves together her family's story with the larger history of Cuba and the United States, a relationship she has studied for decades. When she and I spoke, Cuba was in the grip of a catastrophic energy crisis: blackouts lasting twenty to twenty-two hours a day, hospitals unable to run incubators or dialysis machines, no fuel for ambulances. "A country can't survive like that," Ferrer said.

The Story Her Mother Left Out

Ferrer's mother was a natural storyteller who turned their departure from Cuba into a ritualized tale of mother and daughter against the world. She described wearing heels, carrying a heavy baby, navigating one mishap after another, and finally reaching Ferrer's father in New York on July 4, 1963. "I was always there and I was good and I behaved and we got here," Ferrer recalled her mother saying. The story always ended the same way: Ferrer, then an infant, supposedly recognized her father and threw her arms out to him.