Can Cuba Ever Overcome Its Past?
A Q&A with historian Ada Ferrer on Cuba’s legacy of slavery and revolution, its tangled relationship with the U.S. and why the Biden administration is missing an opportunity to help Cubans build a better future.
Cubans can’t escape Castro’s shadow.
Photographer: YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty Images
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve the world’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Clara Ferreira Marques: Your latest book, “Cuba: An American History”, is a sweeping narrative that illuminates Cuba’s tangled, centuries-old relations with the United States, ties which remain no less tangled today. What prompted you to tell Cuba’s story as an “American” story?
Ada Ferrer, Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Carribean Studies at New York University, and author, “Cuba: An American History”: The US has played such an outsized role in Cuban history that I think there’s no way to write a history of Cuba that isn’t also a history of the U.S. and Cuba. Cuba has also been a recurring presence in U.S. history. It was there from the moment of American independence. It was there as the new republic went out into the world as a commercial power and then as a military and political power. The history of a place where the U.S. has been so present is also a history of the U.S. — a way to see U.S. history from the outside in, through the eyes of another.