Life Between the Cracks of History: An Immigrant Family's Story (with Ada Ferrer)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we map the territory of human identity and connection. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about immigration is Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ada Ferrer.

ADA FERRER, clip from the episode: You know, life is complicated. People are complicated. History is complicated. And here is the story of one family. And, you know, I say it's a family broken by history, and it is, but it's also a family made by history. You can't understand our family unless you put us in history. And I think you can't really understand history unless you make room for families like ours and people like us, just ordinary people. They're not the ones making history, but they're the ones living it.

BLAIR HODGES: Ada Ferrer was 11 months old when her mother fled Cuba in 1963. That was four years after Fidel Castro came to power. Ada was too young to remember that moment that would shape her family's future, but her mother passed details of the story to Ada like an inheritance. Not every detail, though. And Ada's father had secrets of his own, too.

Ada found many of the missing pieces in a trove of letters her parents left behind after they died, pieces that she fits together with broader Cuban history in her new book, Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. And she joins us to talk about it right now.

 

Fleeing Cuba – 01:50

 

BLAIR HODGES: Ada Ferrer, welcome to Relationscapes.

ADA FERRER: Oh, it's great to be here, Blair.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book opens with a story that your mom used to tell a lot—how she fled Cuba in 1963 together with you. You were 10 months old, and both of you were going to meet your father in the United States. Take us to that scene in New York City from the opening chapter of your book.

I'll have you read on page five here, where we join you and your mom as you're landing in America.

ADA FERRER: Okay.

BLAIR HODGES: Or rather, landing in the United States!

ADA FERRER: Yes. Good catch. All right. Is it making too much noise when I do that? Should I take it off the jacket? Does it matter? I'll take it off the jacket.

BLAIR HODGES: You can take it off. A little bit of page wrestling is kind of cool, but...

ADA FERRER: Yeah. Okay. But maybe not too much. Okay. The bottom of page five. Here I go.

We finally landed in New York City on July 4. My father picked us up at the airport. When I saw him, I opened my arms to him as if I already knew him, even though I had never met him before.

When my mother told that part of the story, she always repeated the scene of my first meeting with my father, as if to make sure that the listener understood how momentous that was, how proud she was of me. I can picture the scene of our arrival: my mother unable to contain her joy, her arm around my father's shoulders as he held me aloft, seeking recognition in my eyes, both of them oblivious to the passengers streaming around either side of us like water parting around an island.

Had there been a large plate glass window there, had the light been just right, the three of us together might have cast a single shadow shaped something like a heart. There we were, an immovable trio, my mother's little family in the most consequential event of her life. I was my mother's companion. And if I close my eyes, I can see her eyes on mine, feel her fingers curled around my arm, squeezing, hear the lilting sound of her voice as she tells our story again and again.

 

Cuba's Socialist Revolution – 03:58

 

BLAIR HODGES: She would tell that story again and again to you because you have no immediate memory of it, being 10 months old.

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: But you've since become an expert and a historian of Cuba, the place you and your mother left. So looking back, what was happening in Cuba that had your dad leave and that resulted in your mom bringing you this way? What was going on in Cuba?

ADA FERRER: Right. Well, there was a revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power on January 1, 1959. And initially it was received with overwhelming support by the Cuban people. My mother was very supportive in the beginning. My father was more skeptical.

By the time we left in 1963, the revolution had changed. Fidel Castro declared it a socialist revolution in 1961, in the context of the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion. And in 1962 there was the missile crisis. So by '63, several things are clear. First, there's a very hostile relationship with the U.S. Diplomatic relations have been broken. There were no longer embassies. There were no commercial flights. And then the other thing is that Fidel Castro has declared the revolution socialist.

BLAIR HODGES: What was significant about that, though?

ADA FERRER: Well, it was the middle of the Cold War, and Cuba had traditionally been a close ally of the United States, a kind of client state of the United States. So here we were, the U.S. at loggerheads with the Soviet Union, and we had an island 90 miles from the coast of Florida that was communist and allied with the Soviet Union and willing to have nuclear missiles facing in the direction of the United States.

So it was hugely significant. Nothing like that had ever happened in Latin America, which the U.S. always considered its backyard.

BLAIR HODGES: And your dad was kind of skeptical about it. I assume he wanted political change, perhaps, but maybe wasn't on board with the way it was going? Or what was his position?

ADA FERRER: Well, he was, you know, he was a country boy from the center of the island, sixth-grade education. He did something that many men of his generation did, which was to join the army as a means of social mobility.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

ADA FERRER: So he joined the army. He became a stenographer in the army. So he was not particularly political or ideological, but he was very, very anti-communist, which was not so uncommon in Cuba at the time. And actually, a lot of the people who supported Fidel Castro in the beginning were also anti-communist.

So his suspicion was from the start that Fidel Castro was a communist, and he didn't support him. So very different than my mom, who was happy when he came to power and celebrated and cheered and remained supportive initially.

BLAIR HODGES: Why did he end up leaving? And he left first. So what ended up happening?

ADA FERRER: Yeah. So he, you know, he was a member of the army. One of the first things that Fidel Castro did on taking power was dissolve the army. So my father lost his job, ended up selling sandals in a park in Havana, just trying to make ends meet.

In 1961, in the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro called on ordinary Cubans to denounce neighbors, to denounce anyone they thought might support a U.S. invasion. And so a neighbor denounced my father as a potential supporter of the U.S., as a counterrevolutionary, et cetera, et cetera.

BLAIR HODGES: So he was a dissident?

ADA FERRER: Yeah. Yes. Actually, you didn't even have to be a dissident. It didn't even have to be anything as formal or even as committed as a dissident. The idea is that you were suspicious. People were arrested preemptively on the basis of what they might do. So a neighbor denounced him as someone who might support an invasion, and that...

BLAIR HODGES: ...could result in arrest, or what?

ADA FERRER: And in that moment, in that time, in the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs, it did. It did result in arrest. So about 50,000 people were arrested around, you know, in the days leading up to the invasion—which was actually... today's the anniversary, right? April 17.

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

ADA FERRER: Yeah, which was April 17, 1961. So I can't do the math. Was that 65 years ago today?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I'm a humanities person, so that's right.

ADA FERRER: Me too.

Anyway, so he was arrested. He always said that the guy who denounced him was just a cranky neighbor and my father owed him money, and he wanted to get back at him. I don't really know. But I do think that my father would have supported an invasion had it made it to Havana.

But anyway, he was arrested. He was detained for about a week in a movie theater because there were not enough prisons to hold the people who were denounced those days. So they turned a movie theater—it was called the Blanquita at the time, and it was the largest movie theater in Cuba, I think maybe even the largest movie theater in the world. It later came to be called the Karl Marx Theater.

He was detained there for about a week and then finally let go. But it was in that moment that he made the decision to leave. I think he'd already been thinking about it, but that scared him. He thought that maybe it could happen again.

He'd been in the army. He knew of people. Actually, in the army he used to work for the military intelligence service as a stenographer. And the military intelligence service used to keep tabs on anti-government activities—anti-government activities against Batista, right? So when the revolution wasn't in power.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. He's probably on a list somewhere.

ADA FERRER: So he's probably on a list. And so what he did is he used to type up the reports on interrogations, on subversive activities, and so on. And I actually found in an archive a report that he had typed.

So he knew people, or he knew of people he had worked for—people who had been arrested and who had been executed. So he was always scared of what might happen to him. And he left.

BLAIR HODGES: And he wasn't the only one. There were a lot of people leaving.

ADA FERRER: A lot of people leaving.

 

Leaving Poly Behind – 10:03

 

BLAIR HODGES: He wanted to do it quickly. He took advantage of an opportunity—a strange sort of opportunity that you describe in the book, for people that want to check that out. But your mother then wants to join him, and she's going to bring you along. So, as you just read, your mother reunites with your father in New York, not knowing how long the family would be gone.

As far as she knew, however the revolution went, you might be back in a number of weeks or months or a couple of years. And for all the times that your mother would tell you the story of fleeing Cuba, you say that she actually left out the most important thing about it.

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: And that's the fact that she took you with her but left behind a son, your older brother.

ADA FERRER: That's right.

BLAIR HODGES: Tell us about that.

ADA FERRER: So I have an older brother. He's her son from her first marriage. His name was Poly, which is short for Hipólito. Everyone called him Poly or Polito. And when we left in 1963, he was 9.

The reason he didn't leave with us was that, in order to take him out of the country, his father needed to grant permission for that to happen, and his father refused. His father was a member of the new Revolutionary Police. He didn't think it would reflect well on him to have his son leave the country. He was also—I mean, I grew up thinking of him as not a good person. And I think he was also kind of vindictive and didn't want to give in to my mother. And so he didn't let his son leave.

BLAIR HODGES: He also didn't seem very involved in...

ADA FERRER: He did not seem very involved in...

BLAIR HODGES: ...Poly's life at all.

ADA FERRER: No. So it was a vindictive, selfish, and cruel move on his part. He didn't raise him. He didn't go see him much. He didn't provide financial support. So he was a fairly absent figure for Poly, but present in the huge effect he had on his life by not letting him leave.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And not only did your mom not bring Poly with you, the second thing that you learned later in life is that she didn't tell Poly that she was leaving.

ADA FERRER: Right. Yeah. And that was so hard for me to accept, to kind of just... to hear. So when she left, she did not tell him we were going. She didn't say goodbye. We left behind his back.

And, you know, part of me, even from... you know, just like, how could...? How could she do that? But it was a different time, and it wasn't something she decided alone. She decided in consultation with her own mother, my grandmother, with her sisters. And their thought was that it would just be too hard to tell him—that he would cry, he would get hysterical, that it would just be too painful for everyone, for my mother, and that maybe she wouldn't be able to leave if she saw that.

So they made a decision not to tell him and to break it to him after the fact. And that was supposed to make it easier. But, you know, I think of it, and, you know, people... people make all kinds of decisions they don't want to make.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. This is like a Sophie's Choice type of situation.

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: She had a 10-month-old baby as well. And who knows what the revolution is going to do? And your father was already there, and who knows how long it's going to... I mean, you can stack up all the reasons on both sides. On the other side, being a parent, caring about Poly...

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: ...and his welfare, and knowing that his father probably isn't going to be there for him, and all the trauma that can cause. So there are so many factors.

ADA FERRER: And really, the other thing is that she always believed—and my grandmother and my aunts and everyone always believed—that once my mother left, his father would see it was real, that Poly's father would say, "Okay, I'll let him go." That after she was gone, he would step up and give permission for him to leave.

And everyone kept trying that. So my grandmother kept appealing to him, my aunts kept appealing to him, Poly kept appealing to him. And everyone assumed that he would. That was the main thing. They assumed he would give in and allow him to leave.

Then the other thing they assumed is that the revolution wouldn't last much longer and that we would come back. We would go back to Cuba.

 

The Heartbreaking Letters – 14:42

 

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, hindsight bias is 20/20. Those hopes make sense. But tragically, neither of those things happened. And your book is filled with records created by your family. One of the most powerful things, I think, about this book is its immediate access to the past through these documents, including a collection of letters that young Poly, at, you know, age 9 and up, was writing to your mother.

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: What do you remember about those letters? Because you're looking at them to tell this family history, but it's also so personal for you. What stood out to you in these letters from this young boy?

ADA FERRER: Well, I mean, one thing that stood out at a very basic level is just that the letters existed. So, I mean, I remember letters when I was growing up, and I remember my mother reading them, and I remember her reading them out loud to us. I remember seeing his handwriting and loving the way he wrote his name.

So I have a memory of them, but I had no idea that she had saved them and that they survived. And so I didn't discover the letters until after my mother died, until after my father died.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. This is in 2022.

ADA FERRER: In 2022. And I was alone in their apartment and just opened a closet, and there was this clear box on a shelf. I pulled it down, and she had them all in a stack together, still in the envelopes. And she had tied them with gold curling ribbon to keep them all together.

And I remember I opened the first one, and I think she had them in order, or partly in order. The first letter in the pile that I opened was the first one he had written to her, and it was written less than a week after we left. And I just couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it because I recognized it was a boy's handwriting. I saw his signature at the end. I looked at the date, and I just couldn't believe it.

And I feel like the letters are a gift to me, right? They let me see my brother growing up. They let me see the relationship. They let me write this book. And so they were... they're like Poly's gift to me. They're my mother's gift to me. They document something horrible that happened, something incredibly painful then. Yet to me, they're a gift.

BLAIR HODGES: You even said that the word you use to describe reading them is excruciating.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, he's a little boy, right? He's nine and a half. He has no idea what's just happened to him.

So when we left—and, you know, my mother... and this she revealed to me very late in life. She was in the hospital after her surgery. At the time, I was writing my book, revising my book on Cuba and Cuban American history, and I was working on the chapter on migration after the Cuban Revolution.

And I remember, you know, I was in the hospital with her, going up to her bed and just sitting with her and saying, "Tell me something about when we left Cuba." And she said—we left in Spanish, but I'll translate it—she said, "We left the house at six in the evening. Poly was outside playing with friends, so he had no idea what was happening as he was playing."

And so that night we went to an aunt's house who lived in a more central neighborhood in Havana. And then in the morning we left for the airport and left for Mexico City. So even the decision to leave the house the night before was about leaving in a way that Poly wouldn't see.

And so I start reading the letters, and, you know, they tell him, well, within less than a week they tell him, because the first letter is dated May 4. And originally they told him that my mother had gone to the countryside to care for an ailing relative, and she had taken me with her.

So I don't know... you know, they told him within the week. And then he starts writing these letters. They were in a little boy's handwriting. Initially, he's not expressing his feelings, and they were just excruciating to read.

You know, he'll say things like... the one in particular that got me was actually... let me just check. It's very short. I don't want to get it wrong.

BLAIR HODGES: It's on 77, I bet.

ADA FERRER: Seventy-seven. So this is in February 1964. So we'd been gone a little over nine months. And he writes, "When a letter arrives from there, I get so happy that sometimes it makes me sad."

You know, and there's lines like that all over the letters. "I miss you." "I really want to see Evita." "If you only knew how much I miss you all." "I want you to send me something because I am sad." You know, things like that.

It's a little boy, and he's sad, and he's trying to make sense of it. And he's asking her to send him, you know, shoes or money for a bicycle, things like that. So they're little-boy letters, but they're just full of this deep, deep trauma and hurt.

BLAIR HODGES: And I think, you know, we'll talk about this a little bit later on, but your relationship with Poly becomes complicated. And so that's another angle, I think, to why these letters affected you the way that they did when you read them.

We're talking with Ada Ferrer about the book Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter.

 

Immigrant Parents, Immigrant Kids – 20:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Ada, let's talk about your life in the United States. I'm thinking about a quote from chapter eight where you write, "If my parents discovered America in Brooklyn's East New York, it was in a town called West New York that I discovered Cuba." I couldn't help it. Cuba was everywhere there.

I love this because your parents are experiencing the United States, and you're experiencing Cuba here in the United States. Talk about what it was like growing up there.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. So I grew up mostly in a town called West New York, New Jersey. We moved there just before I started second grade, so I was seven. And I lived there until I went to college.

It's a very urban town. It's less than a square mile and had about 45,000 people, I think, when I grew up there. The majority were Cuban, like my parents, like us. And it was just a kind of working-class immigrant town. A lot of the women worked in factories, in textile factories, as my mother did. And most of the businesses were owned by Cubans.

Most of my classmates were Cuban. We went to church in Spanish. The collective prayers were always for the freedom of political prisoners in Cuba. You know, Cuba was everywhere. All the posters on businesses were landmarks of Cuba—the lighthouse, the Capitol building, et cetera. So a very, very Cuban place.

Our dentist was a Cuban dentist who didn't have his license yet, so he'd work on our cavities in his living room without anesthesia. Right? Like, I mean, it was just a typical... it was an immigrant... it had always been an immigrant place.

BLAIR HODGES: So probably the food and the music...

ADA FERRER: The food. The music. Yes, the food.

BLAIR HODGES: There were huge waves of Cuban migration at this time. I hadn't spent a lot of time looking at the history of this, and your book lays it out really well alongside your family story. So you say that about 300,000 Cubans came over between 1967 and 1973. That's huge.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Right now, in this context, that seems unreal because there's such animus and discrimination against immigration and against immigrants. Whereas at this time, during the Cold War, the United States was really trying to open the doors and say, "Hey, actually come in here." This could help us, like, get numbers for the Cold War. We want to promote this. And they gave voting rights really quickly, tried to process naturalization really quickly.

So it was this kind of strange—you call it a hybrid—a strange hybrid world where you grew up. It was Cuba in the United States in some ways. But still, you talk about some distancing that happens between parents and children in immigrant families. So you grew up bilingual, which meant that you were often a translator as a kid. You were kind of not just a kid, but also kind of an employee of the family, you know, without wages or whatever.

And you also lacked the cultural depth of the Cuban context your parents left behind. So it's sort of growing up in two worlds. What was that like between you and your parents?

ADA FERRER: Well, you know, for me, it was just normal. It was just life.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's the way things were.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And were there tensions about it, though?

ADA FERRER: Yes, absolutely. Because, you know, first of all, there was this idea that we were going to go back. And at some point, you know, I stopped wanting to go back. Right? Like, I don't want to go back there. Like, what am I going to do back there? I'm, you know...

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you don't know that exactly.

ADA FERRER: Exactly. But, you know, so there was that. And then there was this kind of... they seemed so old-fashioned. They had really old-fashioned ideas about gender, which, you know, I think I was always a little feminist, and I resented that. And so there were tensions around that, right? The idea of what girls were supposed to be, what women were supposed to be.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Wouldn't you and your sister be like, "We're not in Cuba anymore," if, like...

ADA FERRER: Exactly. So that was... I was just going to say that. So they would say, "Oh, you can't do this. You can't do that. You can't do this." And I was like, "We're not in Cuba anymore. This isn't Cuba." And it just became this constant refrain in all our arguments.

So, yeah, there was a lot of tension about that. But, you know, at the same time, I think I say in the book, my sister and I didn't consider ourselves American. And I don't think most of the people we were growing up with considered themselves American. I think that might be different now for other people. But, you know, I think we just thought we were Cuban. "What are you?" "Cuban." "We're Cuban." "I'm Cuban." And that was what we always said.

BLAIR HODGES: And a lot of Cubans did, too, even though a lot of them were seeking citizenship in the United States. It was more of a political safety than a deep identity. And it seems to me like there was space in the American consciousness, maybe, at least as far as you all were aware, that that was fine.

Because there's also the racist, assimilationist insistence of, like, if you come over here, you have to do it, quote unquote, the right way—which is often impossible.

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: And you have to leave behind whatever else and, like, wear American flags...

ADA FERRER: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: ...everywhere.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. And it just, you know, it wasn't like that. And as you said, it was a different time. It was the Cold War. And it wasn't that Americans loved Cubans, but it worked to be able to show all these people fleeing communism. It kind of proved the superiority of the American system, of capitalism, of democracy, et cetera, et cetera.

So it looked good. So they gave them all these advantages, which immigrants would never get now, and which Cubans still technically have because the law that gave them those advantages, called the Cuban Adjustment Act, is still a law. But the current administration isn't really honoring it.

BLAIR HODGES: It's such a different context now.

ADA FERRER: It is.

 

A Brother Struggles – 25:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, we could talk forever about that. I want to dig more into your family, though. This is what's so powerful about the book, is you're telling these broader kind of political, geopolitical stories, but how they play out for families is also pretty different. They're these little stories that happen within these broader histories that sometimes get lost when we're taking a mile-high view.

ADA FERRER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: So let's talk about Poly a little bit more. As he gets older, the letters kind of take on a different hue.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: You say that they become more and more disturbing. What was Poly going through before he ended up getting to the United States?

ADA FERRER: You know, that was another reason the letters were so excruciating, right? The letters in the beginning are excruciating because he's a little boy missing his mother, not knowing what's going on.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ADA FERRER: As he gets older, as he becomes a teenager and a young man, I started to see him as someone who was really traumatized, understandably. Someone who... you know, I titled the chapter where I talk about those letters "Mother Hunger." I mean, that's what comes across in the letters, this deep, deep, deep hunger and need for his mother.

And so the letters grow increasingly intense. He talks about loving my mother, missing her, willing to give up his life for her, wanting to beat up his father because his father's an animal. You know, he finally uses the word trauma explicitly to talk about what he experienced. And there's one letter in which he even describes what the trauma feels like, where he says, "I try to do the right thing, but no matter how hard I try, it all unravels."

And so what were some of the things that were unraveling? Well, I know from the letters that he was doing some drinking. He was smoking and drinking, gambling...

BLAIR HODGES: His school wasn't working out at that point.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. So he started drinking about 15. But the main thing—and this was a total surprise for me. I had no idea that this was the case—he never finished fifth grade.

So he was left back shortly, you know, the year that we left, which was probably an early sign of that trauma. But then he just never... he never finished. He would fail his promotion exams, or he would just be absent all the time, or he wouldn't show up. And he was never able to finish the grade and advance to sixth grade. So he changed.

BLAIR HODGES: This wasn't terribly unusual either, right? There were a fair number of...

ADA FERRER: Yeah, well, that's what was so surprising. So, you know, people always talk about education as one of the achievements of the revolution. And there was a literacy campaign that taught unlettered people to read and write. There was an enormous increase, for example, in college attendance. Any disparities between Black and white Cubans in terms of educational achievement were basically eradicated, or close to eradicated.

So on the one hand, there were these incredible achievements. Poly went to school at a place called Ciudad Libertad, which was kind of a model school for the revolution. It was created in the facilities that had been the largest military establishment in the country, Camp Columbia, close to where my parents lived. My father worked there, and it became a school. And the idea was a showcase for the revolution: rifles into pencils, culture instead of war, learning instead of war, that kind of thing.

But it turns out, you know, the neighborhood that it was in was a kind of poor, working-class neighborhood, and a lot of people were having the experience that Poly did. So I found some interviews with a teacher there who said about 10% of students were left back every year. So it wasn't that most, but it was significant enough.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, 10%. Yeah.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. I know that Poly was not the only one. I think his was particularly extreme, but he was not alone.

BLAIR HODGES: By the time he eventually came over to the U.S., you were a teenager, and he's older than you. And this is when you first start to realize he's different, perhaps, than the picture of the brother that was painted for you—that little boy in the photo that your mother had and in the stories that you were told.

And you realize you're a lot further ahead when it comes to education. And he's got rough edges. And as a teenager, you've kind of carved out your own space in this country, and all of a sudden this older brother shows up. So there was a lot of tension, actually. It wasn't like a happy reunion for you when he joined your family in person?

ADA FERRER: No. And I really expected it to be. You know, all my whole childhood, he was like this imagined big brother. And, you know, if you grow up watching things like The Brady Bunch, which I did, he was like the big brother in an American sitcom or something like that.

And he wasn't like that at all. You know, he had rough edges. He smoked. He drank beer. His voice was really loud and gruff. And, you know, he was just different than the brother that I had created in my imagination.

And then it was just awkward. You know, like, what did we talk about? And all of a sudden he was there sleeping in our living room. We were in a two-bedroom apartment, and we didn't have an extra room. My sister and I shared a room. My parents had the other room. And he slept on a cot in the living room. And he was there all the time.

He arrived the month I turned 18, the month I graduated from high school. I was getting ready to go to college. So I was kind of getting ready to leave the family. And it was just a difficult moment for that relationship to get started.

BLAIR HODGES: He's probably coming in, also, on his side and seeing this... what he sees as a very privileged person who didn't have to go through what he went through.

ADA FERRER: Right. Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: You're kind of the chosen one.

ADA FERRER: I was the chosen one, yeah. And I think that was always there. There was my guilt. There was his resentment. And I think he just didn't understand, right? He came from a place where, you know, people didn't go to college. Or if they went, you know, people in Havana who went to college, a lot of them lived at home.

The idea that I was leaving, you know, and that I was leaving just as he showed up... right? I think there's a part of him that didn't understand.

 

Histories Nested Within History – 32:15

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's a really volatile mix. And as you go off to school—you go to Vassar and you're studying there—and as your educational career advances, you start to fall more and more in love with Cuba, which set the stage for you to become one of the premier historians of Cuba.

You wanted to get a degree in Latin American history at UT Austin. And while you're learning in school, you would also pepper your family with questions. Like, here's your parents. You can ask them all these questions, but you say their responses to you were often disappointing. So what's going on when you're, like, disappointed with their answers? They're like a primary source, right?

ADA FERRER: Well, you know, I think... and I think that experience really shaped the way I think and write about history now.

But the idea... you know, when we think about history, we think about History with a big H. We think about big events. We think about structures and major transformations, right? And what happened was I would read about historical things, and I would ask my parents, "Do you remember that?" Or, "Did you go to...?"

The thing is, often history is written kind of in the collective, right? So there was a Cuban Revolution, and Cubans went out into the streets and celebrated. And that's true, right? But it doesn't mean every Cuban did. And when people say Cuba went through a revolution, it's kind of an abstract thing. Cuba... what is Cuba? It's just a collection of people, right?

And I would ask them things like, "Did your parents follow the Constitutional Convention?" "Did you go to the rallies for Fidel Castro?" "What was your experience of the agrarian reform?" And their answers were always no. So, no, we didn't go. No, we don't remember. No, we didn't go to the rallies. No, we didn't watch on television because we didn't have televisions. No, we didn't have experience of the agrarian reform because we had no property. You know, that kind of thing.

So it was always no at the time.

BLAIR HODGES: That would be pretty disappointing.

ADA FERRER: Yeah, exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: But I think, as a historian, you found out that their stories still matter. Actually, will you go to page 189? This is one of my favorite excerpts.

This is a really cheesy comparison I'm going to make here.

ADA FERRER: Okay.

BLAIR HODGES: So, with all apologies...

ADA FERRER: Go ahead.

BLAIR HODGES: But I related to this in a very silly, privileged way, which is... I remember in seventh grade the Beatles became huge again. When I was in seventh grade, there was so much hype around The Beatles Anthologies. And I fell in love with the Beatles. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, my mom was there."

So I went to my mom and I was like, "Tell me about it. Tell me all of this..." And she was like, "No, I didn't really listen to the Beatles."

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: And I was like, "Womp, womp!" [laughter]

ADA FERRER: Yeah. Exactly!

BLAIR HODGES: So that's such a minor thing. So I can't imagine, with a thing like a country and a revolution and all this, how that might have felt. So at the bottom of 189 there, where you say, "What I was discovering..." Start there and just read this passage.

ADA FERRER: Let's see if I can find it. "What I was really discovering..."

BLAIR HODGES: Third line from the bottom.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: So this is a powerful moment about the macro history of Cuba and then these individual histories that you have fallen in love with as well.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. Okay.

And what I was discovering, without yet being able to put it into words, was the gulf between the history of Cuba I was learning and the history of the two Cuban people who were my parents. There were probably many fewer people who showed up for political rallies and such than there were people like my parents, utterly ordinary people, always on the margins, absent less as a matter of ideology than from an unconscious sense that history did not belong to them.

My parents' story, like that of so many others, could not be absorbed into the central one. It was both its disruption and its essential counterpoint. And it was precisely in that mis-encounter between the history I was reading and the history of my own family that I found the seeds of how I myself would come to write about the past and its people.

But in all those unusual phone calls about history and experience, there was something else, too. Embarking on a journey that would catapult me to worlds way beyond my parents, I longed to keep them with me.

And that was true. That was the way I kept them with me, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love this. This is where we get into the nitty-gritty of life.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: This is where the big histories include so many of these little histories. And it's so much more complex and interesting and beautiful and tragic and troubling and messed up and amazing and...

ADA FERRER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: This is, to me, the power of learning history. Not necessarily those big stories.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. And that's the way I think about history in general. This idea that, you know, I mean, history is all these things, but there are all these lives that are kind of nested within it. And each of those lives kind of condenses that history and is buffeted by that history, sometimes in ways people don't realize.

BLAIR HODGES: And there are more twists coming in your book. Again, it's called Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. Ada Ferrer is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. She's also taught at New York University and wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Cuba: An American History.

 

Letters From Another Brother – 37:20

 

BLAIR HODGES: So speaking of twists, Ada, I did not see this one coming. None of the twists caught me off guard as much as when I found out your mom wasn't the only one who left a son behind.

ADA FERRER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: Your father left his son behind from a different relationship. So you had another half-brother back in Cuba this whole time. This is Juan José. What was it like finding out about that?

ADA FERRER: I mean, I was really excited. So my father had a relationship with a woman before he met my mother, and the woman became pregnant and had a child. My father never married the woman, never recognized the son.

So my father... I remember the conversation in 1987. I was doing my master's degree at the time at UT Austin in Latin American history, and I was visiting them in Miami. They had moved to Miami by then for the summer.

And he told me he had a son in Cuba. And what did I think? Should he be in touch with him? And I was like, yes, absolutely. You know, I was like, how could you not be in touch with him? You've got a son in Cuba. He's in Cuba. I was already studying Cuban history. I was planning on... you know, I wanted to go back to Cuba. I wanted to meet him. I'm always hungry for information. I wanted all the information, you know. And I wanted him to be in touch.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you think there was anything about you that wondered if, like, the Poly situation was not great? Here's another brother. Was that any part of it?

ADA FERRER: I mean, I don't remember thinking that at the time. In writing the book, I thought that maybe, you know, it could be that even for my father, seeing what had happened to Poly made him more curious, made him feel guiltier, made him feel more responsible. So I think maybe that was part of his thinking, but I don't know for sure.

And then in my case, I think, yeah, maybe I wanted another chance at a brother.

BLAIR HODGES: And you went back and visited. You stayed with him for a time. There's a great letter that he wrote to your father that you quote from. This is on page 221. I'll have you read this.

So you've gone out to visit him. You spent time with Juan José. And then he and your father just kind of took on this correspondence over a number of years. That was just such a sweet and loving parent-child relationship. So, yeah, let's hear this.

ADA FERRER: This was in my... I went to Cuba for the first time in 1990, and this was from that first trip. And I had just gone for the weekend to spend time with him and with my father's family.

I left for Havana later that day after a huge meal at Gregorio's. As the time of my departure approached, several people stole away to write short letters to my father, letters I would carry to him by hand. That became a ritual on every subsequent trip, too.

I have the letter that Juan José wrote to my father that day.

"Having overloaded myself with emotions, and now with hardly any time, I write you these lines. I feel happy to have had Ada among us today. We spent time with Gregorio, José, Manuel, and Aurelia. I felt good with them. So did my family.

It is now time for Ada's departure, and I cannot fathom what to say. Just two words. I had imagined her affectionate and down to earth, and I have discovered her better than that. It is hard to put into words the days we spent together. Several times my eyes watered, but out of happiness. I won't go on. The moments fly. My only wish is for us to see each other again soon."

BLAIR HODGES: It's beautiful. He's a beautiful writer, too.

ADA FERRER: He was such a beautiful writer. He lived in a small rural town in the center of Cuba, and he was a high school Spanish language and literature teacher.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So the letters back and forth between he and your father are so beautiful. And I'm not doing a ton of spoilers in this episode, but I will say one here. The tragedy being that Juan José passed away before your father, so that relationship was cut short.

 

EXCERPT: Poly’s Birthday – 41:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: And here on the other side, Poly is still going, and he's getting into a lot of trouble at this time. He winds up in prison. He's charged with attempted murder. There are all kinds of difficulties going on on that side.

And as you mentioned earlier, your resentment—or the difficulties in your relationship—built up until you finally confronted him at one point, or had a kind of more straightforward conversation with him. You got a little bit blunter. I wanted to hear you read from that part as well. This is on 284.

So Poly had, again, been causing a lot of problems for your family, and you confronted him about it?

ADA FERRER: Well, I didn't quite confront him. I wanted to, but I didn't. I was too scared to confront him.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

ADA FERRER: So, want me to start there?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. That's an interesting distinction. Now let's read this. I want to unpack that.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. Okay.

Yet there was also a part of me that always wanted to talk to Poly about all of it. About my mother's decision, about his life in Cuba, about his arrival here. But I never dared. The closest we came was on one of his birthdays, December 6. I called him. He answered. I wished him a happy birthday and asked him how his day was going.

He answered angrily, "How could it ever be?" And then his rant began. He had never been a part of our family. He was not a Ferrer. Everything was bad, wrong. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.

I finally spoke. "I know," I said, "but I have my own pains. I suffer too." A defensive, guilty, selfish response. I know.

He seemed surprised. It broke the momentum of his rage. I asked him if he was taking antidepressants. He said he refused to take any psychiatric drugs. I'm not sure if that meant he was not taking the drugs prescribed under the treatment program.

The whole conversation lasted less than 10 minutes, maybe even less than five. My heart racing the whole time.

I wonder now what kind of conversation we might have had if I hadn't been so scared. If the woman who began life as the little baby sister he had loved so much as a boy had said something like, "You are right. You have suffered through things that never should have happened to you. I know that the mother who I love as much as anything in this world, the mother who loves me the same way, did that to you. I know I was the chosen one. Please forgive her. Forgive me."

But I didn't say any of that. I was too afraid. We just hung up.

 

The Vulnerability of Memoir – 43:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's interesting that I remembered that as a confrontation, because really what you just said was like, "Hey, I hurt too."

ADA FERRER: Yeah. But even that was so much to say.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

ADA FERRER: That's as close to confrontation as I got.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And to see what you wish you could have said. Now, again, the tragedy being you didn't ever get the opportunity to do this. Poly passed away, and this is a conversation that will never be had.

What was it like then, putting it in a book that everyone can read? Like, kind of sharing it with the world instead of being able to share it with him?

ADA FERRER: Yeah, you know, I'm not sure yet.

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

ADA FERRER: To be honest. You know what I mean? I think there was... and I say this several times... I think I was always going to write this book. You know, in college I wrote a short story about my mother leaving him behind and taking me. I started writing essays about it several times. I think there was always a part of me writing it, or at least since the time he came to the U.S., right?

But now that I've written it, it'll be out in the world, and everyone will make what they will of it. And I don't know what that'll be like. You know, that's one of the... that's one of the things that I'm a little... I mean, I don't know if I want this out there. But, yeah, it's one thing that's just a big question mark for me—what it'll be like to talk about the book in public, how people will respond to it.

On the one hand, I feel like the book is a kind of... not monument, but a kind of testament to what he went through, to how unfair it all was to him. So in some sense I'm trying to honor him. But at the same time, it's an ugly, difficult history for everyone.

And one thing that I want... maybe I hadn't thought about this before, so let me... let me...

One thing that I think I want people to take from it is that there are no monsters and there are no saints in this story. I love my mother. I adored my mother. I think she was the best mother in the world. And yet she did this to Poly.

You know, Poly used to threaten to kill us. Poly tried to beat me up once. You know, so on some level, yeah, maybe he was something of a monster. But he wasn't. He was just this little boy who'd been hurt in really unimaginable ways and who wanted love and acceptance more than anything else.

So I just... you know, life is complicated. History is complicated. People are complicated. And here is the story of one family. And, you know, I say it's a family broken by history, and it is, but it's also a family made by history. You can't understand our family unless you put us in history.

And I think you can't really understand history unless you make room for families like ours and people like us, just ordinary people. They're not the ones making history, but they're the ones living it, right? They're the ones who deal with it day to day, who suffer its consequences, who kind of feel its effects in their bones and in their souls, you know.

BLAIR HODGES: What do you think makes you so reluctant to have to talk about that?

ADA FERRER: Not reluctant. I just don't know what it's going to feel like, in a way. I mean, this is actually the first time I'm doing it.

So, you know, it's strange because this is my fourth book. All of them have to do with the history of Cuba in some sense.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ADA FERRER: When you write a history book, when you talk about a history book, you write and speak with authority, right? And it took a lot for someone like me to feel that authority.

BLAIR HODGES: That's hard-earned. To live it, to...

ADA FERRER: To inhabit it. To accept it, you know?

And so here I'm writing in part as this little girl, but I'm also writing as who I am and who I became. But it's just like... the book makes me go back to these painful stories in which I was still a different person. And I didn't have any authority. I had a lot of fear and a lot of sense of not belonging.

And so how do I speak about that in public? You know, I don't know. I haven't quite figured it out.

BLAIR HODGES: I get that. I also wonder, too, if it's just part of your training, because you're trained up as a historian in a way that... historians don't often put themselves in the story. And so it also seems like that's just not the type of work that you do. In fact, sometimes that can even be frowned on. Like, don't make yourself part of the story.

You say in the acknowledgments you thank your editor, Colin Harrison, for telling you, "Hey, we need more of you in here. Put more of you in here."

ADA FERRER: I would cringe when he said that, but he was right. He was right, yes.

But I think it's important for people to put themselves in the story. I mean, this is history. I mean, it's such a personal story. It's a memoir. It's intimate. It's raw. It's painful.

BLAIR HODGES: See, your family's lucky. This is what I was thinking. Ada is like... if everybody had an Ada to do this kind of work. This is reparative and healing, but also unflinching and not comfortable. What a gift to your family.

And you even mention that sometimes your mother maybe had an inclination that this could be possible by preserving these records and kind of leaving breadcrumbs for you along the way. So maybe she didn't lay everything out about not telling Poly that she was leaving and all the things she left out of the stories, but she left the record.

ADA FERRER: Can I show you something? Well, you're not going to be able to show this. I refer to this in the book.

This is this little jar I found. And she labeled everything in it. And it has this red paper-tissue rose. That's the rose that Poly sent to my mother with my aunt. And she put a little... I'm not going to be able to get it. There's a little tiny...

BLAIR HODGES: I was going to ask you if you had it near, actually.

ADA FERRER: Oh, I wish I had this here. But here is... yeah, here's her little note where she kind of labeled everything. She was just like this natural archivist, natural historian.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

ADA FERRER: And that tape—the tape she made that had all the chants of the street vendors and things like that. So...

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the cassette tape. So cool. I love this.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: So, and I imagine, again, you know, you're trained as a historian, so I think you probably were exercising a lot of muscles in this book that you weren't necessarily trained to use. So I think maybe some of the difficulty comes from that as well.

ADA FERRER: Yeah, but it was also good. I mean, the thing is, part of what allowed me to do it, because it was so hard writing so personally and so openly, was that I had the sources my mother left me. That I could be the historian, digging through the letters and going to the archives and looking for my brother in the camp and things like that.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. In the camp that he first arrived at, the sort of refugee-type situation.

Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter is the name of the book. I recommend it so much.

 

EXCERPT: Visits to Her Father – 51:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's go to page 322 to conclude here. There are so many stories in the book that we didn't have time to talk about. But I did want to end with the last months of your father's life. He died at age 101. So he outlived your mom. I mean, that age just seems unreal and miraculous to me.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: But, of course, at the same time, it also meant that he suffered from dementia as time went on. And he had become a prolific writer in his later years. He would write all this stuff. He would write letters to Fidel Castro. And you found all these records and stuff, and you tried to tap into his memories as he was losing his memories through his writing.

So read this excerpt here about when you would visit your father.

ADA FERRER: Every time I visited, I tried giving him the notebook to see if he would write again. My sister sometimes did the same thing.

"I'll write it down," she begged. "You can just dictate."

One day, he recited a poem of his own invention, and she transcribed it just as he said it in Spanish. I've reproduced part of it here in my own translation, but I didn't have to translate the word beautiful, because that one, for some reason, my father said in English.

"I have before me a pretty vase of flowers with white, red, green, and yellow petals. They are beautiful. They asked me to write more, but frankly, what I want to do is tell my daughter to go to hell."

He and Aiksa would have laughed together.

The rest of the notebook is completely empty.

Whenever I visited, I spent time sitting in a recliner next to his rented hospital bed. I'd extend my hand and take his, and we'd just be quiet together.

One day I asked him about his letters to Fidel Castro. "How did you get Fidel's address?" I asked. He told me he had just figured it out. I asked if Fidel ever replied. He said he couldn't remember ever having received a response.

I asked him what he said to Fidel in the letters. He paused, then said sheepishly, "Cualquiera se equivoca. Anyone can make a mistake."

But I don't know if he meant that the mistake had been his in writing to Castro at all, or Fidel's in making the revolution, as he had...

Another day, sitting in the same manner, our hands limp together on the edge of the bed, I thanked him for bringing me to the United States. I have never quite felt one with this country, but I know with absolute certainty that I have made a life here that would have been inaccessible to me in Cuba.

That day I pondered aloud with my father what might have happened if he hadn't brought me to the United States when he did. "Maybe I would have left later as an adult. Maybe I'd be trying to leave now," I said, "across the U.S.-Mexico border," as many Cubans were then doing. "Maybe," I added, "I wouldn't have made it. Who knows what might have happened?"

So I thanked him again, and he looked pleased. It was more intense than pleasure. He looked into my eyes like I was the proof of something.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Ada Ferrer reading from the book Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 54:26

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Ada, let's close with the segment Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is a moment when you can reflect—and you kind of already have—so let's hear what you have to say about anything you would change about the book as it's coming out soon.

ADA FERRER: I mean, basically, you know, I just finished doing the audiobook. And as I was doing the audiobook, there were a few things, but tiny things. Like I would have changed some of the chapter titles, some of the phrases that were really hard to say orally. I wish I had thought about them and written them differently. But I think it's too soon to tell.

I think I need more responses and conversations with people. So I'm not sure yet about regrets.

Surprises... there were so many surprises as I wrote it. I mean, one surprise I've mentioned is just finding all the things that my parents left that served as resources for me, that I feel like they were gifts to me and they allowed me to write the book the way I did.

BLAIR HODGES: And it feels like a book of surprises. Like there's surprise after surprise, and we get to experience those with you as you tell the history.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. So I think that was a big surprise. You know, on the one hand, I wasn't surprised by how hard it was to write in terms of dealing with reading Poly's letters and dealing with the pain of the story and the heartbreak of it.

One surprise, though, was how much I loved working on it. I just loved working on it. I loved... and I say in the acknowledgments that part of that is that I would come to my study every morning, and I would get to spend time with my parents, just thinking about them and reading their words and kind of living in my relationship with them.

So how much I loved doing that, and just how soul-affirming it was, was a surprise.

BLAIR HODGES: Your sister has read it?

ADA FERRER: Yes, my sister has read it. Yeah. She read a draft and gave me some feedback, and it was very, very helpful feedback. And she's been great throughout this whole process because, in some ways, it's the story of my life, but it's the story of our family's life. So people are going to find out a lot about her through this book.

And, you know, I would call her out of the blue and say, "Remember this? Remember this? What about this?" You know? And that wasn't always welcome because you'd be going about your life, and all of a sudden I was calling out of the blue to ask her about things she didn't want to remember in that moment.

So, yeah, it was hard emotional labor for her as well.

BLAIR HODGES: So...

ADA FERRER: Yeah. So she's been great.

BLAIR HODGES: If this is too personal of a question, I can retract it, but did you talk to any therapist or... I mean, there's a lot of family trauma in here for you, too. So did you have to process that in any way?

ADA FERRER: Oh, I've been in therapy forever.

BLAIR HODGES: You're like, "I'm already there."

ADA FERRER: I've been in therapy forever. Don't put that in. Don't put that in! [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

ADA FERRER: I don't know. You do what you want. No... maybe not. Maybe not!

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] No, I don't have to put it in. I think it's cool because I think people need to hear that therapy's a thing and that... I don't know. To me, there's too much of a stigma around it.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And I don't think enough people...

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Only if you want me to, though. Only if you're comfortable. That's not a problem.

ADA FERRER: Okay.

I've been in therapy forever. I wish more people in my life were in therapy.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Agreed. And a lot of this podcast is sort of directed in that way, so... yeah, same.

ADA FERRER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: In fact, I need to get back in. It's been a little while, so...I'm ready to get back.

That's Ada Ferrer, author of the book Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. She also wrote Cuba: An American History, which won a Pulitzer Prize. She's the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University.

And Ada, again, there's so much in the book—I say this a lot, but this book is just packed with wonderful, tragic, beautiful things and we couldn't cover it all. Thank you so much for all the work you did to put it together. And thanks for taking time to talk with me about it.

ADA FERRER: Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. It's a great first conversation about the book. I'm so excited I got to have it with you here.

 

Outro – 58:27

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's it for this episode of Relationscapes. If this is your first time with us, welcome to the journey. I hope you'll check out some of the other episodes while you're here.

And if you're enjoying the podcast, I would really appreciate it if you'd rate and review it in Apple Podcasts. You can also rate it in Spotify.

Another way you can help me grow the audience is by recommending the show to a friend. If somebody in your life came to mind while you were listening to this one, send them a link.

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Mates of State provides our theme music.

I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.