Recommended readings: Cuba, an American History, by Ada Ferrer

 

A significant part of the relationship between the United States and Latin America during the 20^th century was defined by our relationship with Cuba. What turned Cuba and the US into rivals was not the 1959 triumph of the young guerrilla men and women that defeated and deposed the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, but instead on December 2, 1961, when Fidel Castro declared his new government communist and turned to an alliance with the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War. Until then, the American press primarily portrayed Castro as a freedom fighter that would deliver some form of liberal democracy after Batista.

From 1957 to 1961, the US and Cuba were, as during much of their previous history, a sort of quarrelous allies. And in 1959 friendship reached a high point. Castro put special care into befriending American media during his guerrilla campaign. US reporters interviewed Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos several times in their Sierra Maestra quarters. The US and Fidel were undoubtedly playing both ends of the nascent Cold War until the CIA fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 signaled the final break with the US and the beginning of a direct alliance with the USSR.

 "Cuba, An American History," by historian Ada Ferrer provides a long-view perspective of the Cuba-US history. As an American citizen born in Cuba who has continued to return to the island since she left it as a child, Ferrer combines her personal experience with solid scholarship in terse prose to provide a well-balanced portrait of the complex relations between Cuba and the United States.

The result is a picture of unusual clarity, precisely because Ferrer does not fudge complexity and stick to historical facts. The book starts the history of Cuba and the US  with the first trip of the now vilified Christopher Columbus and follows up to the times of Donald Trump. Ferrer's focus on the people's history rather than the government's only shines light on the US and Cuba's critical common ground and ideals rather than on the apparent confrontations. To do so, it avoids the political narratives espoused and promoted by the rival governments to focus on the actual relationships between Americans and Cubans from 1959 to -almost- the present.

Ferrer shows how history repeats itself in both directions. How American independence was supported and launched from Cuba (which controlled Spanish Florida), secession and the slave trade, and how the Cuban flag and its independence founders came from New York and New Jersey.

The book prologue provides a good example:

"Prologue: There and Here 

"The connections between Cuba and the United States stretch back over centuries and run in both directions. Few Americans have likely considered the significance of Cuba for the United States. During the American Revolution, Cubans raised funds in support of Washington’s army, and soldiers from Cuba fought against the British in North America and the Caribbean. 

As the thirteen colonies lost access to other British possessions, the Spanish colony of Cuba became a vital trading partner. In fact, Havana’s storehouse of coveted silver currency helped finance the new nation’s first central bank. Later, after Florida and Texas became states of the Union in 1845, propertied southerners—and even some northerners—looked to Cuba as a potential new slave state or two, as a way to buttress the power of slavery and its economy. 

In 1898, the United States intervened militarily in Cuba and declared war on Spain. With that intervention, the United States turned what had been a thirty-year movement for Cuban independence into the conflict that history usually remembers as the Spanish-American War. 

The end of some four hundred years of Spanish rule was ritually observed at noon on January 1, 1899, with the synchronized lowering of every Spanish flag on the island. But the flag raised in its place was not a Cuban flag but an American one. With that began a full-fledged military occupation that ended four years later, only after Cuban leaders, under enormous pressure, agreed to grant the US government the right of intervention in Cuba. If the events of 1898 were fateful for Cuba, they also helped produce two consequential developments in the United States: first, the reconciliation of the white South and North after decades of disunion and, second, the emergence of the United States as an imperial power on the world stage. 

For more than a century, the role of the United States in Cuban independence has been the subject of disagreement— a shared history viewed in radically divergent terms. Historically, American statesmen have tended to view US intervention in 1898 as an illustration of American benevolence. The United States had rallied to the cause of a neighbor’s independence and declared war to achieve it. In this version of history, Cuban independence was a gift of the Americans, and for that Cubans owed them a debt of gratitude. In Cuba, however, 1898 represents something entirely different: more theft than gift. There, 1898 was the moment when the United States swept in at the end of a war the Cubans had already almost won, claimed victory, and proceeded to rule over Cuba as a de facto colonial power. Cuba Does Not Owe Its Independence to the United States read the title of an important book published in Havana in 1950. 

Alongside that American presumption and Cuban resentment, however, existed dense networks of human contact forged over decades by people of all kinds in both countries. 

Cuba’s flag was designed and flown for the first time by Cuban exiles in the United States. 

The first pro-independence Cuban newspaper was published in Philadelphia, and the first national novel was written in New York. 

Cuba’s most famous patriot and writer, José Martí, spent more of his adult life in the United States than in Cuba, and the largest memorial service for Cuba’s most important war hero, Antonio Maceo, was held at Cooper Union in New York. 

Cubans traveled to the United States to study at Harvard and Tuskegee, to shop in Miami, to play baseball in the American Negro Leagues, to escape dictators, and to view the famous falls at Niagara. 

Americans traveled in the other direction: to drink during Prohibition in the States, to buy land and cigars, to convert people to Protestantism, to forge networks of Black solidarity, to honeymoon and to fish, to hear jazz and get abortions. 

Americans listened to Cuban music, and Cubans watched American movies. Americans bought Cuban sugar; Cubans bought American appliances. Actually, Cubans bought just about everything (except sugar) from the United States."

Then Fidel Castro came along for almost 50 years and Cuba-US relationships seemed to take a 180 turn at the political level. At the social level, relationships remained like those of a family divided by forced migration, with one-third of Cubans living in the United States -most barely 100 miles away in Florida- while the other two-thirds remained -willingly or not- in their home country. After reading Ferrer's book the concept of "home country" for Cubans becomes healthily extended. 

The video at the beginning of this entry is worth watching in its entirety. Ferrer was interviewed in 2018, shortly after Barak Obama's trip to Cuba, and spoke candidly and presciently about its repercussions. At that time, the book we are discussing was still unpublished -Ferrer read the manuscript here and there-, and a well-informed American and Cuban audience made sharp and enriching questions and comments.

The book now includes Trump's four-year return to hostilities and Biden's more recent return to Obama's opening. 

Cuban-American history is still in the making, but it is clear that it will not be long before returning to its traditional roots. Cubans will be freer, and Americans will discover more about their Southern cousins.