Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Prologue: There and Here Prologue THERE AND HERE
Cuba: An American History tells the story of a tropical island that sits between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, not far from the United States. It is a history of more than half a millennium, from before the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the death of Fidel Castro and beyond. Yet, for a history so sweeping in scope, this is also a deeply personal book.

I was born in Havana between the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. My father was in New York, having left the island a few months earlier. My mother went into labor alone and hailed herself a cab to Workers' Maternity. The hospital's name fit the moment; Cuba was, after all, in the throes of a radical revolution, avowedly socialist and stridently anti-imperialist. Yet the hospital had been built two decades earlier under the rule of Fulgencio Batista, the very dictator Castro unseated in 1959. Monumental in size and style, the hospital won architecture awards when it was built. Its most emblematic feature towers over the main entrance, a soaring ceramic statue of a mother and child created by Teodoro Ramos Blanco, a Black sculptor who was among Cuba's most renowned artists. That morning in June 1962, my mother paused and looked up at the statue as if in prayer before entering the hospital to give birth. Ten months later, she left Cuba, statuesque in her heels and with me an infant in her arms.

We left the house at six in the evening. My nine-year-old brother was outside playing with friends, and she had not told him that we were leaving without him. His father, her first husband, would not grant permission for him to go. At the airport, a woman in uniform put her fingers to my earlobes to feel the tiny gold-post earrings, as if about to take them, and then changed her mind. On arriving in Mexico, my mother had to rely on the kindness of a stranger to make it into the city. When we got to Jim Crow Miami a few

Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995. She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.

"The heroes of Ada Ferrer's narrative are the island's nationalists and reformers. . . . [She] reveals a relationship that is deeper and more troubled than it may appear. . . . Yet readers will close Ms. Ferrer's fascinating book with a sense of hope. . . . moving." -The Economist

"Cuba focuses on the equivocal relationship of the two countries, and presents it convincingly as symbiotic. . . . exemplary . . . [full of] lively insights and lucid prose. . . . By being equally severe with Cuban leaders and US leaders, Ms. Ferrer achieves an honorable objective: pleasing nobody by being just." -Wall Street Journal

"Important. . . . rather than putting geopolitics or 'great men' at the heart of the book, Ferrer's focus is on the Cuban people, the descendants of whom are calling for libertad." -The Guardian

"Ferrer's narrative history of Cuba's past 500 years is epic, authoritative, and deeply insightful. . . . [an] essential book. . . . Cuba is broad and expansive and inclusive, telling a hemisphere-wide story of colonialism, enslavement, and entangled empires, nations, and peoples-the legacies of which are still with us." -Geraldo Cadava, Public Books

"This monumental new book represents another formidable piece of original scholarship. It is written, moreover, in an admirably paced narrative style, which, one suspects, will earn it pride of place among the published histories of Cuba." -Jon Lee Anderson, Foreign Affairs

"An encompassing look back at Cuba, from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day. . . . a moving chronicle of the relationship between the United States and Cuba and what that's meant for both sides." -Forbes