Cuba: An American History

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Ada Ferrer, the author of this book, is a Cuban American historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University. Previously, she taught in the History Department and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. Ferrer specializes in the history of Cuba, and her interest in the country derives from her own family background. Ferrer was born in Cuba and came to the US with her mother when she was 10 months old. In 1990, when she was in her late twenties, she visited Cuba for the first time since her departure and reunited with her family who stayed behind. Since then, Ferrer has visited the island many times. Her research for Cuba: An American History was informed by the archival research she conducted while in Cuba, as well as other academic sources.

In her work, Ferrer attempts to demystify Cuban history. On her website, she notes, “On a very personal level, I grasp how insufficient are the many slogans and convictions about Cuba, held on both the right and left of the political spectrum. That knowledge influenced my turn to history and my desire to always place people first in the ways I tell it” (“

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