Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Summary
Ada Ferrer traces more than five centuries of Cuban history, from Christopher Columbus's 1492 arrival through Spanish colonization, the sugar economy built on enslaved African labor and the long fight for independence that ran from the Ten Years War beginning in 1868 through the war led by Jose Marti in the 1890s. Ferrer follows the Spanish American War of 1898, which ended Spanish rule only to bring the island under American occupation, the Platt Amendment that constrained Cuban sovereignty after nominal independence in 1902, and the decades of American economic dominance that followed under a series of Cuban governments culminating in Fulgencio Batista's 1952 coup.
Ferrer carries the story through the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the trade embargo that has now run for more than six decades, treating the island's relationship with the United States as a single continuous story rather than a series of separate crises. She joins that broad political and economic analysis with personal threads drawn from her own family's history, since Ferrer was born in Havana in 1962 and left Cuba as an infant the following year, growing up in New Jersey with the island's history as lived family memory as well as an academic subject.
Ferrer writes accessible narrative history built for general readers, moving fluidly between wide analysis and vivid individual episodes across five centuries. Reading the book means seeing how deeply Cuban and American history are bound together, and it suits a reader who wants the island's revolutionary present explained through the full weight of its colonial and imperial past rather than through the Cold War alone.
Historical Context & Significance
Cuba: An American History shared the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History with Nicole Eustace's Covered with Night, that year's sole finalist being Kate Masur for Until Justice Be Done. Scribner published the book in 2021.
Ferrer, now the Dayton Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University, earned degrees at Vassar College, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan before building a career largely spent at New York University, where she had already won prizes for her earlier books Freedom's Mirror and Insurgent Cuba. Her own family's departure from Cuba in the early years of the revolution gave the book a personal dimension reviewers noted alongside its scholarly range, and it has become a standard general history of the island for readers outside academia who want its long relationship with the United States explained in one volume.