A Review of Cuba: An American History

Havana, founded on Cuba’s southern coast of Cuba, was moved to the northern coast when the conquistadores learned how to take advantage of the Gulf Stream’s force on their way back to Europe. But the Florida strait is also a bond. Key West lies 106 miles north of Havana, only a fraction of the distance to Cuba’s second-largest city, Santiago, on the island’s eastern tip.

It is this bond across the stream, between Cuba and North America, that the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner Ada Ferrer’s book Cuba: An American History (Scribner 2021) explores. It has intertwined politics and economics, conveyed solidarity but also oppression. It has dictated the actions of those who sought a closer relationship and set the boundaries for those who aspired to national self-determination.

Ada Ferrer, professor of history at New York University and the author of a number of books on Cuba and the Caribbean, was born in Cuba in 1962 into a family that soon left country for the United States.

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer (Scribner, 2021)

The book should become, and also risks becoming, a seminal work for anyone concerned about the fate of the Cubans. Ferrer takes a political helicopter perspective on the bond across the strait and sees its power. But her perspective also means that she does not see, or perhaps does not want to see, the Cubans standing along the Malecon, Havana’s waterfront, gazing northward. For them, there is no bond, only a hellish gap to overcome in their flight from poverty and oppression.

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Before the Revolution, several thousand Cubans lived in the United States, but numbers have escalated into the millions. Just from October 1, 2021, to September 30, 2023, 425,000 Cubans arrived at the U.S. borders. If the bond across the Gulf Stream were a bridge, it is uncertain how many Cubans would stay on the island.

For a long time, migration was the primary evidence that the central conflict in Cuba was not between the governments of Havana and Washington DC, but between the government in Havana and the Cuban citizens. The nationwide demonstrations for freedom in July 2021, and the recurring protests since then are new evidence of where the conflict line goes.

The risk with Ada Ferrer’s historiography is that it teaches us nothing about this central conflict, about why Cubans migrate and protest.

Cuba’s First Modern Trauma

The book shines the brightest in its description of how the international trend to abolish slavery led to fear of national independence, and how the political interests behind the slave economy in the U.S. South and Cuba were one single political force.  But the key part of the book is on the 20th century.

Victory was just a few battles away in Cuba’s 1898 war of independence when Cuba’s first modern trauma occurred. The United States intervened, and the war quickly transformed, into the Spanish-American War, which ended with the United States taking control of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba.

When the Cuban Republic was proclaimed in May 1902, it did so with severely curtailed sovereignty because the so-called Platt Amendment to the constitution gave the United States veto power over Cuban foreign relations, the military base in Guantanamo and the right to militarily intervene on the island when deemed necessary.

In 1934 Sergeant Fulgencio Batista took power in a coup, reached an agreement with the United States to abolish the Platt Amendment, laying the foundation for him to dominate Cuban politics for the next 20 years. He launched an ambitious development program for the country, including a new constitution based on widespread citizen input. In 1940 Batista was elected president and the new constitution went into effect.

“For the first time in its history, Cuba would be ruled by a constitution drafted and signed without the presence of an outside governor, be he Spanish or American,” Ferrer writes.

Batista served the one four-year-period the constitution allowed him to serve, but when he wanted to return in 1952, and lagged far behind in the polls he carried out another swift coup, deposing the president, dissolving the Congress, and freezing his own constitution.

But Cuban society had not spoken. Among the many who revolted was Fidel Castro, whose battle cry was the demand to reinstate Batista’s 1940 constitution. He created a militia and attacked an army base in eastern Cuba which became the start of the civil war. And this is where, I believe, Ada Ferrer’s history starts to get problematic.

After taking power in January 1959, Fidel Castro tore down every brick in the Cuban state’s construction and rearranged them into something entirely different. In a matter of years, all democratic institutions disappeared, as well as all foreign and Cuban companies, independent grassroots movements, political parties and media outlets.

In the chapters on the beginning of the 20th century, about Cuba’s first modern trauma, Ferrer vividly and meticulously describes how the war of independence and the founding of the republic in 1902 did not lead to Cuban independence, but to dependence on the United States. Therefore, Ferrer interprets the revolution as an act of resistance and rebellion against the United States. And the bulk of the pages about the period after 1959 deals with this conflict.

However, she does not present the revolution as an independent political project and avoids the fact that the revolution became the Cuban people’s second modern trauma, as it did not respect their sovereignty. The revolutionary political project has never received popular legitimacy through a referendum, or a democratic election preceded by free debate.

With the privilege of looking back at more than 60 years of uninterrupted revolutionary government, Ferrer could have analyzed the consequences of this political project. Instead, she describes the radical reforms anecdotally, as a chain of events. This leads to three key shortcomings in the description of the decades after 1959: it lacks analysis of the revolution’s consequences on the economy, politics and the people’s will and ability to organize resistance.

In 1968, the last 50,000 small Cuban businesses were closed within a matter of days. Simultaneously, Fidel Castro introduced a radical land reform that distributed agricultural land from large private owners to individual families and state-controlled farms and directed all resources to producing sugar for the Soviet Union.

However, Ferrer does not make the conclusion that declining food production, the fact that Cubans have been living with ration books since the 1960s, and the severe food shortages of today are linked to how the economy has been organized since 1959. Instead, she blames the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the U.S. embargo for the poverty, without mentioning that Cuba can trade with Europe, China, the Middle East and Latin America without restrictions.

The second central deficiency is the lack of analysis of the evolution of the political system since 1959.

It was not until 1976, after 17 years of Fidel Castro’s non-constitutional one-man rule, that the Communist Party wrote a new constitution for the state. But Ferrer completely sidelines the communist political system. She explains the continuation of the revolutionary government’s power through the narrative that it is the revolution that fulfils the independence of the Cuban nation, and that the conflict in society is the one between the nation, the revolution, communism and Fidel Castro on one side, and imperialism, counterrevolution, capitalism and the United States on the other.

Ferrer describes well how the tool to uphold this conflict has always been massive participation of the citizens in the revolutionary projects. At the beginning, it was easy to mobilize the Cubans to build something new. But soon, participation became less voluntary as it also involved participating in the oppression of neighbors and friends, in repudiation campaigns against those who emigrated, in workplace meetings to condemn critical colleagues, in unpaid work in the sugar harvest, and so on.

The problem with Ferrer’s historiography is that she interprets the massive participation as evidence of support for the revolution, and not as a result of the risk to ending up on the wrong side of the line between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, between nationalists and traitors.

This leads to the third deficiency in the chapters about the period after 1959: the lack of analysis of Cuban resistance during Fidel and Raul Castro’s time in power.

Resistance to Fidel Castro has never been based on support for Batista’s military dictatorship or opposition to political liberation from the United States. The resistance was not about what Fidel Castro was against, but what he was for. And he did not turn Cuba into a communist one-party state because the citizens wanted it, but because he wanted it.

Resistance, therefore, began quickly after Fidel Castro took power, specifically regarding communism. Although Fidel Castro had never said he was a socialist or aimed towards building a communist state, critique arose from within the revolutionary ranks already during his first year in power. The Minister of Agriculture resigned in protest against “what he saw as” communist infiltration. And a little later, Huber Matos, one of the top comandantes during the war, followed due to “what he believed was” communist influence. (Ferrer mentions that Matos was arrested for this but not that he was not released until 20 years later.)

Despite the evident proof, Ferrer however refrains from acknowledging their accuracy.And this reluctance to giving Fidel Castro’s opponents credibility recurs in the book’s most disheartening sections, the sole page dedicated to “dissidents” in the 1990s, and the few sentences regarding recent activists.

In passing, Ferrer mentions Oswaldo Payá and his Varela Project, which in the early 2000s gathered more than 20,000 signatures for multiparty elections, and the San Isidro movement, a group of artists, painters and writers who in recent years have fought for freedom of expression. Ferror does not say that what unites conservative Cubans in exile, market liberals and democratic socialists in Cuba is that they all support multiparty democracy and human rights. She does not mention any other prominent democracy activists, not Elizardo Sanchez, who played a central role in the human rights work of the 1990s, nor Raúl Rivero, who was crucial for the independent journalism. She does not mention blogger Yoani Sanchez, who founded the news outlet 14ymedio, or the publications Cubanet and Diario de Cuba, indispensable sources of information..

Ferrer manages to omit historian and democracy activist Manuel Cuesta Morúa, but devotes a longer section to his great-grandfather, Martín Morúa Delgado, an Afro-Cuban senator during the early 1900s.

Although Ferrer repeatedly refers to her long periods of time in Cuba since the 1990s, these chapters rely heavily on just a few books and texts written by American academics. There is not a single reference to articles or books by Cubans in Cuba who have openly advocated for democratization, nor to any of the independent news outlets. She simply avoids dealing with them, and it is obviously a deliberate choice.

And, I believe,  the reason Ferrer has made this choice says much more about the Cuban reality of recent decades than all the pages about the conflict with the United States: fear.

The fear that all Cubans I have met feel or have felt about being ostracized by friends and colleagues, the fear of losing their job or education, the fear that neighbors will report what they say to the security police, the fear that their children will bullied by the teachers at school, the fear of the police closing down the small business they have invested all their time in, the fear of being arrested and mistreated, the fear of being forced into war, the fear of spending years in prison, the fear of being executed, the fear among Cubans in exile of not being able to return to see their parents, or—specifically for Ferrer—the fear of losing the opportunity to conduct research in Cuba in the future. The fear of the consequences of speaking one’s mind.

Ferrer knows that if she conducted a thorough analysis of the economy, the political system and the resistance to the revolution, and interviewed those who openly advocate for democratization she would no longer be able to conduct research in Cuba.

Ferrer writes wonderfully, humorously and excitingly about the history that is no longer controversial, but as she approaches the present and realizes that what she writes can have consequences for herself, she lowers her gaze. The text stiffens, and she avoids all the looming questions..

In her paradigm, the U.S. policy towards the island is the starting point for understanding the Cuban reality. But no one can stand besides any of the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who have been looking north across the Gulf Stream from the Havana Malecon since the 1960s and tell them that it is the United States that determines their Cuban future.

They do not want to leave because of Fidel Castro’s conflict with the United States, they want to leave the consequences of the political project that Fidel and Raúl Castro and the current government have forced upon them since 1959.

Erik Jennische is Department Director for Latin America at Civil Rights Defenders, and author of Hay que quitarse la policia de la cabeza – Un reportaje sobre Cuba (Ertigo 2015)