Four years ago, Cuban exile scholar Ada Ferrer won the Pulitzer Prize for History for Cuba: An American History, a sweeping appreciation of how intertwined the stories of Cuba and the U.S. truly are.
In that spirit, Ferrer, now a history professor at Princeton University, has written a memoir, Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter — a poignant, sometimes haunting and ultimately redemptive exploration of Cuban family separation and unity across the Florida Straits, as well as a triumph of dogged genealogical research.
Ferrer will discuss Keeper of My Kin Thursday evening at Sanctuary of the Arts in Coral Gables. She recently spoke with WLRN from New York about the book — and her New York Times op-ed this month urging Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel to make vital political and economic changes.
About midway through Keeper of My Kin, Ferrer remarks that she's suddenly realized the "gulf between the history of Cuba I was learning, and the history of the two Cuban people who were my parents." Ferrer says that chasm prompted her to pivot from her acclaimed Cuban history to Cuban memoir.
"I think I was going to write this book all along," she says.
"As a historian, I work on social history — history from below, of ordinary people. My family were humble Cuban family, no property, didn't lose anything in the [1959] revolution; came to the U.S. and struggled here. And I just wanted to understand what the revolution meant for people like them.
"What did migration mean for people like them? Why we left; why some family didn't. What united family that lived on two sides of the Florida Straits; what divided them.
"Those questions I was interested in from the time I was a teenager."
And some of them were painful.
Ferrer and her mother Adelaida left Cuba in 1963, when Ferrer was still a baby, and first settled in Brooklyn, New York, with her father Ramón, who was already there. But what really forms the core of Ferrer's narrative is the sad saga of her half-brother Hipólito, or Poly, from her mother's first marriage.
Poly had to be left behind in 1963 because his father, a revolutionary, would not consent to let him go. Poly later comes to join them in the U.S. during the 1980 Mariel boatlift — but his life as an immigrant is scarred by his feelings of abandonment.
“I think I came to think of [Poly’s story] as an original sin — that my own privilege, all the opportunities I had, had in some sense perhaps come at his expense,” Ferrer says.
“So I lived with that guilt, even to this day.”
READ MORE: Richard Blanco's new Miami memoir explores 'becoming' Cuban-American
That guilt was made more complicated when her mother told her about a pivotal and suspenseful moment just months before their 1963 departure to the U.S.
Adelaida was walking Havana Harbor with an infant Ferrer and Poly, then nine, when she realized she had a chance to abscond with them onto a boat headed back to the U.S. after delivering medicine and other aid in exchange for Bay of Pigs prisoners.
Going aboard, as so many other Cubans were spontaneously doing that day, would have obviously changed Poly’s life. Ferrer’s mothers starts to do just that — then turns back, as Ferrer describes the poignant scene in her memoir:
Her arms stiff from carrying me, her feet starting to ache, her eyes moist, she turns away from the scene, back to the little house behind the military hospital, her two children in tow, a boy just turned nine and an infant girl of six months.
My mother’s version of the story always ends the same way, not with a scene but with an explanation. I heard it dozens of times. She hadn’t been able to leave the country without saying goodbye to her mother.
Four months later, on April 29, 1963, she left Cuba without saying goodbye to her son.
Adelaida and Ferrer would, in fact, have to hurriedly leave Cuba that day in 1963 without being able to say goodbye to Poly.
“I wanted to tell a story of the sometimes horrible, haunting decisions that people have to make when they migrate, when they leave,” Ferrer told me.
“And I think writing it helped me to have more empathy for my mother, whom I adored — I absolutely adored my mother — having to understand what she must have felt like in that moment, and for all the decades that came after, because she lived with the guilt of that really until her dying day.”
"I wanted to tell of the sometimes haunting decisions people have to make when they migrate — and writing it gave me more empathy for them."Ada Ferrer
But there is a redemptive story in Keeper of My Kin, and it’s Ferrer’s.
That has to do not only with her later triumphs as a historian, but also her lifetime exploration of the copious letters and archives that are the backbone of the book. Recent years have seen a boom in Cuban genealogy, and Ferrer has advice for Cuban families trying to piece together histories that are often fractured by exile and separation.
“There’s a Cuban genealogy site that’s great,” she says, referring to the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, FL, Inc., “and you can talk to genealogists there. But I think one of the main things is just not to lose touch with people — not to lose touch with relatives on the island if they’re still there — and also to save everything, right?
“I was able to piece together this story because my parents saved so much. We left Poly behind in 1963. After my mother died, I found all the letters that Poly had written her, from less than a week after we left until 1979.”
Ferrer’s memoir includes the almost otherworldly way her mother prevents losing those letters one night.
“So, be your own archivist," she continued. "One of the things I did for this book was to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, or USCIS. You can file a request for your own alien file. And I also did it for members of my family who had already passed away. That was a great resource.”
African roots
Ferrer’s memoir is also distinctive because it reaches back to a Cuban family’s African and enslaved roots. It’s a reminder that race is a particularly complex presence in Cuban history. (Not long ago here in Miami, for example, Cuban theater productions still featured actors in blackface.)
As a result, Ferrer feels Cubans both here and in Cuba need to be more honest about the island’s racial mix — “and about the way that racism persists in both places,” she says.
“Working with a Cuban genealogist, doing some of my own research in the Cuban National Archives — and actually just by chance, finding a relative on 23andMe who also had traced part of our story — I was able to trace all the way back to a woman named Encarnación, who had been stolen from Africa and taken to Cuba, probably around the turn of the 19th century.”
Now, in the 21st century, Ferrer wrote a letter to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel this month in the New York Times that implores him and the communist regime to liberalize the island’s failed and repressive political and economic system amid the worsening humanitarian crisis there.
It turns out Ferrer was just following a family tradition: in his later life, as she describes in her memoir, her father himself wrote similar letters to then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
So does Ferrer think Díaz-Canel too more notice of her missive than Castro took of her dad’s?
“Well, Granma [Cuba’s official newspaper] actually issued a response to my letter, which I found very, very surprising. But I have no confidence that he’ll heed anything.
“The thing is, on both sides, they just keep going back to these tired old scripts.
“Cuba, in public, is still saying, ‘We will fight, we will resist.’ But it’s a very, very different moment — most people in the country are hungry — and those lines just aren’t up to the moment.
“And then on the American side it’s Donald Trump, acting like a turn-of-the-20th-century imperialist, saying, ‘I’m going to take Cuba and I can do whatever I want with it.'
“What I wanted to do was acknowledge that U.S. policy has hurt the Cuban people — but to state the very obvious, that Cuban policy has also hurt the Cuban people.
“And it’s long past time for dialogue.”
If her more even-handed assessment of the Cuba problem seems a departure from the more hardline approach usually heard in South Florida, it’s perhaps a reminder that the Cuban diaspora outlooks in New York — or New Jersey, where Ferrer was raised, in West New York — and Miami, where the Cuban presence is more hegemonic today, haven't always aligned.
Says Ferrer: “I do think there is a difference.”
IF YOU GO
What: Ada Ferrer discusses Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter with fellow Cuban exile author Mirta Ojito, in conjunction with Books and Books.
When: May 21, at 7 p.m.
Where: Sanctuary of the Arts in Coral Gables, 410 Andalusia Ave
