America’s foremost Cuba historian wrote a memoir. It arrives at a pivotal moment

Cuba is, once again, on the brink. Blackouts stretch for days. Food and medicine grow scarce. A record exodus has hollowed out entire neighborhoods. Across the Florida Straits, a familiar refrain rises: This could be the year everything changes.

From afar, headlines can feel like history looping, another geopolitical stalemate. But up close, it’s always been a story about those who stay and those who leave the island, and what’s left behind.

Ada Ferrer is one of the country’s leading historians of Cuba and her timely memoir, “Keeper of My Kin,” arrives at a moment of renewed urgency for Cuba. In it, she argues that the grand narratives of exile and revolution are, at their core, made up of private reckonings with irretrievable consequences.

Ferrer won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in history for “Cuba: An American History,” a tome spanning more than five centuries of entanglement between the island and the United States. Here, she turns that same archival rigor inward on her own family’s immigrant story, as unsparing as it is tender.

My father is from Cuba. He left — escaped, trekked, fled, depending on who is telling it — at 15 in 1967.

Learning about this island in the Caribbean — with its outsized reputation and long shadow — is how I’ve come to understand him. I first heard my father’s story in full while reporting on a cluster of Cuban Revolution–themed apartments in Santa Monica. The owner, it turned out, was a silver-tongued 86-year-old with fierce allegiances to Fidel Castro. Later, recorder on, I asked my father about the country he left behind when he swam onto the crystal shores of the American Base at Guantanamo Bay. Dehydrated and slipping in and out of conciousness, he said the two English words he knew: “political asylum.”

The best immigrant stories insist on specificity even as they gesture toward something universal. Reading Ferrer, I found myself calling him to ask questions I thought I already knew the answers to. Names. Dates. Why then, and not earlier? Why here, and not somewhere else? What did your parents think, feel, say?

The central fracture in Ferrer’s story is not the revolution, at least not in the way history tells it. In 1963, her mother left Cuba with an infant Ferrer in her arms. She had to leave her son from a previous marriage behind. His name was Hipólito — Poly — and he was 9 years old. There was no goodbye.

“I write to make amends,” she reflects, describing a lifetime of studying Cuba as a kind of penance for what she calls being “the chosen one” that spring day in 1963.

She describes Poly as both ever-present and irretrievably gone — an absence that structured the family, then fractured it when he finally joins them thanks to the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Poly is not the long-lost brother she imagined. Gruff and menacing that borders on abusive, he struggles to hold a job and assimilate, eventually undergoing mental health treatment and going to jail. This only intensifies the family’s collective guilt.

“I was the chosen one, and he was left behind,” Ferrer tells me over Zoom last month from Princeton, N.J., where she teaches. “I’ve carried that with me for as long as I can remember.”

I ask Ferrer how she navigates writing about Cuba in a landscape where even scholarship and reporting is often read as political argument. Criticism, she said plainly, comes from all sides: that she is too soft on the Cuban government, or too critical of it; that she says too little about the U.S. embargo, or too much. The reality resists such binaries. The embargo has failed in its aims and functions as a form of collective punishment, she argued, while Cuba suffers under a dictatorship. “The Cuban people are getting it from both sides,” she said. “And they’re the ones who are suffering.” There is no easy solution, no clean resolution that satisfies ideology. Any meaningful change, she added, would have to begin there.

Light filtered through white shutters behind her. On her desk sat a small jar holding a red paper rose — a gift Poly sent their mother decades ago from Cuba. Nearby were more family artifacts: photographs, keepsakes, fragments of lives divided across borders. Among them, a worn “Army of Alphabetizers” badge from Cuba’s 1961 literacy campaign, its lettering nearly faded. It’s a relic from another half-brother, in fact, on her dad’s side — history repeated.

In 2022, after both parents had died, Ferrer opened a closet and found about 100 letters from Poly, the earliest less than a week after their departure. Read together, they form a record of the sons and daughters left behind in post-Revolutionary Cuba. She becomes the de facto “keeper” of these letters and more mementos — a “strange gift,” she writes, the paper trail of something that should never have happened. She begins to cross-reference family lore with a stunning trove of mail in original packaging, baptismal records from remote towns, court filings and Freedom of Information requests. The result is a family story broken by history, and made by it too.

When I call my dad and explain the plot of Ferrer’s book — the Sophie’s choices and Faustian bargains, twists and turns, ironies and parallels — he puts it this way: Sit around a table with a bunch of Cubans, and you’ll begin to hear the different versions of this same story, his included.

There are many places immigrants cannot return to today. Cuba is one of them. For now, I record my father’s story on my computer and save my own family archive, as Ferrer advises, the proof of history. I’ll continue to piece past lives together through books, phone calls and the photographs tucked into old cigar boxes under my bed. I’ll keep my eye on the news and learn what I can, until the day I might see it for myself.

Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She’s at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.

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