Cuba on the Brink: Ada Ferrer on Life Under US Pressure

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1:36The people I'm talking to in Cuba are suffering terribly. Blackouts 20, 22 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 Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:26We'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.

3:16But 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.com forward slash Michelle, you'll see my notes and reflections. So the Bay of Pigs, the Marielle 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.

4:08Dr. 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 thank you not only for being part of this conversation, but really for writing it because I think it's an incredible historical record. 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, a pretty immense achievement.

4:51You 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's 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 U.S. 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.

5:27But 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 Keeper of My Kin where you write that Cuba is the place that you were taught by your family to both love and hate. 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 10 months, or I was taken when I was 10 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, an intense nostalgia about the place.

6:17For a long time, an 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 U.S. to Cuba, I know everything was so much better in Cuba or in Cuba we didn't do that.

6:54In Cuba you would have never been able to do that. All my sister and I could say was you're not in Cuba anymore. So there was, as a good American teenager, I kind of learned to be a little skeptical of everything my parents said. 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 U.S.

7:2790 miles away as it continues to be now, their assumption, and also the U.S. 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 1961, in which, you know, the U.S. invaded Cuba using Cuban exiles, and the U.S. 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 1962, my mother was pregnant with me, so he left a year before we did.

8:08And 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 10 months in 1963, just, 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. She 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.

8:56And we were partners. She suffered. She struggled. She'd never left the country. She was wearing heels. 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 and 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 4th of all dates, 1963. And she always said, you recognized him. You threw 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.

9:34She was scared. My presence helped her, and we survived, and we made it. But when she told that kind of ritualized 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, Poli, 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 ritualized 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.

10:14I always knew the goal was reunification as soon as possible. We talked about him all the time. She, you know, 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 Cuba nostalgia, I just started to become more interested. And in 1977, the four of us, my parents, my sister and I, were sitting in the living room watching Barbara Walters interview Fidel Castro.

10:57And before he came on, there were scenes of Havana, you know, of the malecon 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 15 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.

11:40Your 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.

12:20But I believe it was either in high school or in college or maybe even after college when I first went back to Cuba in 1990 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.

13:03And 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. May the 4th, 1963 is, I think, the date on that letter. And you have the letters in your book, and it's, I mean, they are heartbreaking.

13:43Worse almost as the years go on, as he grows up, because I think it's 16 years until he sees your mother again, but he doesn't get to the U.S. until he is 26. 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 4th, 1963, and they go through 1979. So they're a chronicle of his life without us, but they're excruciating to read. You see him over the years becoming more and more traumatized as a young man, struggling with staying in school, struggling with keeping a job.

14:31And then my mother visits him in 1979 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 1979. And then the following year, 1980, you get a major historical event, something called the Mariel Boatlift, in which 125 ,000 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.

15:12I was about to turn 18 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. 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.

15:51But 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 1920, 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 U.S. Yeah. 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 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?

16:36So he didn't work relationships. All these things are not 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 U.S. 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 U.S., of this complicated relationship? Oh, absolutely. I think that the question of migration to the U.S.

17:17is central to the history of Cuba. I mean, it was in some sense in the 19th century, but especially since 1959. 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 mid-1960s to early 1970s. You had 300 ,000 people leave. Then you had the Marriott Boatlift, 125 ,000 people leave. You had the 94 Rafter Crisis, in which about 35 ,000 people leave. So there's been multiple, multiple waves of migration.

17:59And if anything, that's accelerated since the 1990s. So it's a major part of the story of Miami, certainly, and of 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 archive once someone writing a letter to a friend in the U.S. 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?

18:40The possibility of leaving, the possibility of being left. And right now, if we can bring it to the present, over the last five to 10 years, Cuba has lost about 20 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?

19:20Oh, absolutely. There's no question about that. My mother died in 2020, but she was always thinking about what would happen when she died. In 2014, 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 Tia Niña. 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 Hialeah, 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.

20:00So it was kind of a moot point. But even the fact that she told me that, it stayed with me always. So 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 pharmacies in Miami that send 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.

20:41But for you two 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 U.S.

21:28and 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 talk to them. I talk to relatives regularly. I think about them all the time. Do you wake up to messages from them? Is that how your day begins? No, I don't wake up to messages every day, but I often, and sometimes it's multiple messages from different people.

22:08So 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 U.S. 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 an alligator Alcatraz here in the U.S. I mean, it's just, it's not every day. and I don't begrudge any of them, right? It's what they do and I'm here.

22:49Part 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$150 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.

23:28So then to the present moment, Ada, 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

24:12But also, here's what I can say. The 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 Havana, where they tend to be less severe than in the countryside or in the interior, the blackouts are going to be of 20, 22 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.

24:58And 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 20th 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 in the negotiations. 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.

25:41They don't have power. What threat can a country that's on the verge of collapse be to the U.S.? And also, I mean, yes, their 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. Let me just say, can I just add categorically that the oil embargo is cruel and unjust.

26:21It's collective punishment. It's killing people. Hospitals can't run incubators or dialysis machines. There's no fuel for ambulances to get to hospitals. I mean, 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 U.S.

27:08for more than 60 years, which is to say that the troubles in Cuba, the hardships in Cuba are all the fault of the U.S. and the U.S. embargo. Now, the U.S. 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?