Americas foremost Cuba historian wrote a memoir. It arrives at a pivotal moment
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Cuba is, once again, on the brink.Blackouts stretch for days.
Food and medicine grow scarce.A record exodus has hollowed out entire neighborhoods.
Across the Florida Straits, a familiar refrain rises: This could be the year everything changes.From afar, headlines can feel like history looping, another geopolitical stalemate.But up close, it’s always been a story about those who stay and those who leave the island, and what’s left behind.Ada Ferrer is one of the country’s leading historians of Cuba and her timely memoir, “Keeper of My Kin,” arrives at a moment of renewed urgency for Cuba.
In it, she argues that the grand narratives of exile and revolution are, at their core, made up of private reckonings with irretrievable consequences.On the Shelf Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter Scribner: 384 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Ferrer won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in history for “Cuba: An American History,” a tome spanning more than five centuries of entanglement between the island and the United States.Here, she turns that same archival rigor inward on her own family’s immigrant story, as unsparing as it is tender.My father is from Cuba.
He left — escaped, trekked, fled, depending on who is telling it — at 15 in 1967.Learning about this island in the Caribbean — with its outsized reputation and long shadow — is how I’ve come to understand him.I first heard my father’s story in full while reporting on a cluster of Cuban Revolution–themed apartments in Santa Monica.
The owner, it turned out, was a silver-tongued 86-year-old with fierce allegiances to Fidel Castro.Later, recorder on, I asked my father about the country he left behind when he swam onto the crystal shores of the American Base at Guantanamo Bay.
Dehydrated and slip...