The people I'm talking to in Cuba are suffering terribly.

Right now, blackouts 20, 22 hours a day. A country can't survive like that.

People can't survive like that.

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've never had,

had I stayed in Cuba. 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.

From Bloomberg Weekend. This is The Mishal Husain Show.

We're not even halfway through the year,

and it has been such a dramatic one in world affairs: Venezuela,

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 deep crisis.

Oil that used to come in from Venezuela stopped in January after the US removed

its leader.

And then oil that used to come from Mexico stopped because its government

didn't want to incur President Trump's wrath.

And the effect of this is that in Cuba, people today are desperate.

Like many Cuban Americans,

the historian Ada Ferrer is worried about family and friends there.

But for her,

the current pressure from Washington is part of a long history between

Cuba and the United States.

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 political. Marco Rubio, another Cuban American comes up.

And when you turn to the written version of this at

bloomberg.com/mishal, as I hope you do,

you'll see all of that wider history reflected in my notes,

whether it's the Bay of Pigs, the Mariel boatlift,

Alligator Alcatraz or Cuba and American politics. It's all there.

And here's what happened when Ada Ferrer dialled in from the Princeton

University studio. 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.

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 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 '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 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 for a long time,

an intense desire to return. At the same time,

there was profound disagreement with the government of Cuba.

So that made it a complicated place. 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 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've 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.

Exactly. So I think 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 90 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 1961 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 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,

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 10 months in 1963.

I guess you know that story because your mother told it to you.

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

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. 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 recognised 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. She 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 Poly, 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. 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. His picture was in the house.

I used to kiss his picture at night, 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 the imposition of their Cuban 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. And before he came on,

there were scenes of Havana, of the Malecón,

and the lighthouse and the streets and the cars and so on.

And I looked at it and just started crying, and I would've been 15 at the time,

and my parents just couldn't believe it.

The nostalgia and the pain had always been theirs. 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 Poly 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 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. And

when I learned that, it shocked me. It hurt me,

it crushed me a little bit.

But I think 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.

Yeah, May 4th, 1963 is I think the date on that letter,

and you have the letters in your book,

and I mean they are heartbreaking. Worse,

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 US 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.

And 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.

I was about to turn 18 and about to leave for college at the end of that summer.

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.

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 19, 20, 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,

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 can't really live a life waiting.

So things didn't matter in the present for him because

it would all be erased by his reunification with my mother.

Hence, work, relationships, all 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. Yeah. So it's a terrible, terrible story.

Ada,

tell us how it fits into the wider story of Cuban Americans and perhaps

even Cuban the United States, because, I mean,

you are 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.

I think that the question of migration to the US is central to

the history of Cuba. 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 the early 1970s.

You had 300,000 people leave. Then you had the Mariel boatlift,

125,000 people leave.

You had the 94 rafter crisis in which about 35,000 people leave.

So there's been multiple waves of migration, and 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.

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 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.

So that becomes a part of the story of the Cuban Revolution itself,

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 10 years,

Cuba has lost about 20% 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. So people survive on that.

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 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 Tía 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 much.

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 I'm always calling relatives in Cuba or calling them through other

relatives here and trying to help in any way I

can.

And sometimes that means travelling 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.

But for you too,

to feel that contrast between their lives and yours.

Yeah, I think that's a lot of it.

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. I had opportunities here that he never had there.

Even when I became a historian of Cuba and began travelling

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 that 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 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?

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 it 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 US. I mean,

it's 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 $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.

So 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 US.

What do you think is going on?

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.

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 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.

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 20th century.

And what gets lost in all that is that people just want to live.

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. 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, there are 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.

And let me just add categorically that the oil embargo is cruel

and unjust. It'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.

It's an open letter to the President of Cuba,

reminiscent of the ones that you saw your father write to Fidel Castro,

where you point out where he also

shoulders the blame for the situation in Cuba.

Yeah, because 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 60 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. 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, 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.

There is one person in the administration who knows the story of Cuba

in the way you do,

and that's Marco Rubio who 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 1990.

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 certainly more of an understanding

I think that 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 ... 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 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 for us, which is the revolution itself. Your book,

'Cuban: An American History' goes back much earlier than that to the

ways that the US ... I mean, there was a slogan, wasn't there "Buy Cuba",

which existed way back in the 19th 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 1959 and Castro's victory,

it was a movement meant to oust a dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

It was a movement to restore the 1940

constitution, which Batista's coup had nullified.

It was a movement against corruption in 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,

as the age of colonialism and empire comes to an end.

Right. 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, 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, 1961,

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 1959,

and within three years,

Cuba is a frontline in the Cold War where the standoff

over the Cuban missile crisis between Kennedy and Khrushchev makes the world

confront the possibility of nuclear war.

And it was a real possibility.

I think it's been so long since it happened that people forget that sometimes

that the world did almost come to the brink of armageddon.

I think the idea of intense time is fantastic.

I think that's what it was lived like at the time.

And when you read things from 1959, people at the time were even saying that.

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 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?

Well, this administration's policy regarding immigration,

I think has been cruel and unjust,

and Cubans are not exempted 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 practise,

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 practises.

The question is what will happen in Cuba?

Because if something were to change in Cuba and the

communist government were to fall,

and if people in Miami attribute that to Trump's policy,

then that might erase some of the fall in popularity.

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 unsustainable

in Cuba, which never makes me feel good.

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 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 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. The US has wanted Cuba in one way or another for so long.

And US intervention in Cuba has never ended well,

and it has produced conditions and resentments that then

feed other movements.

So I am just hoping that people in the administration aren't

thinking that this will be an easy win,

and then it's over because for one thing, it won't be over.

The story continues. Even when people talk about Cuba collapsing.

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.

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 those two countries coexist in your life,

because it's clear from reading this book that your daughters have

inherited this attachment to Cuba.

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 Cienfuegos. 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 they do feel an emotional attachment to it that I

think I put there unintentionally, but also that my parents did.

And did it take you a while to

call yourself American?

Yes.

I think you grew up thinking of yourself as Cuban.

How does that transition happen? I think you grew up in a very Cuban community,

and college at Vassar is a key moment of you discovering a wider world.

Right. Yeah, no, everyone I grew up with thought of themselves as Cuban,

and sometimes I'll call myself Cuban-American. But yeah, no,

I think it wasn't until I had children of my own

and began travelling 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 spark gratitude until you are 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 I had opportunities I would've never had, had I stayed in Cuba.

And also there's the idea that even if I had stayed in Cuba,

maybe I would've left later.

Maybe I'd be part of this major exodus over the last years that ended up coming

into the US at the US-Mexico border. Who knows what would've happened.

I owe everything to them. And so I just wanted to tell him that before he died.

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 embrace 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.

Do you think that they would have struggled with your book if they were still

alive to read it, that they would've 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.

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.

Yeah, it's a gorgeous picture. She's smiling. She's holding you in her arms.

Her older son, Poly is right there beside her. Ada Ferrer.

Thank you. Thank you for enlightening me along with so many others.

Well, thanks for having me, and thanks for reading the book.