Read more
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Cuba: An American History comes a heartbreaking yet redemptive memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer’s mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became.
In this beautiful memoir, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into the past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present. We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada’s departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada’s parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind—Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan José, both of whose lives were marked irrevocably by revolution and family separation. Moving between Cuba and the United States and then back again, the book unpacks the experience and emotion of migration, in the moment of separation and over the long-term, for those who left and those who stayed.
Using a treasure trove of letters written across the gulf of family separation and found after the death of Ada’s parents, as well as government documents acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests, Ferrer offers us a profound reflection on belonging, memory, and the lasting imprint of history.
About the author
Ada Ferrer is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. From 1995 to 2024, she taught at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of Cuba: An American History, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history, and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Her earlier books, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution won multiple prizes, among them the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, three prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history. Ferrer has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Social Science Research Council, among many others. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, Ferrer has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.
