Ada Ferrer

Cuba United States

About

Ada Ferrer is a Cuban-born American historian and the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. Her scholarship focuses on Cuba, slavery, race, revolution, and the connections between Cuba and the wider Atlantic world. Her book Cuba: An American History won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. Her earlier work, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, received several major historical awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, Ferrer has returned to Cuba for research since 1990. In Keeper of My Kin, she brings her historian’s perspective to her own family’s story, combining archival documents and correspondence with personal memories to explore how migration and political conflict shape identity across generations.

Books on TheBookRoads

All genres Non-Fiction Memoir History Family Saga Political Writing

All themes Family & Heritage Revolution & Change

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Cuba: An American History

Cuba: An American History

Cuba’s history is inseparable from that of the United States, yet the island’s story is often told through the ambitions of its powerful neighbour. Spanning more than five centuries, Ada Ferrer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history traces Cuba from Indigenous societies and Spanish colonisation through slavery, independence struggles, revolution, and the Cold War. Bringing together the lives of enslaved people, revolutionaries, ordinary citizens, and political leaders, Ferrer reveals how Cuba shaped American politics just as American intervention transformed Cuba. Richly researched and deeply human, this sweeping account challenges familiar narratives of empire and nationhood, illuminating the complex relationship between two countries whose histories remain profoundly intertwined.

Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter

Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter

In 1963, Ada Ferrer’s mother fled Cuba with her infant daughter, leaving behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. What began as a desperate family decision became a separation that shaped generations. Decades later, Ferrer draws on letters, family memories, and historical archives to reconstruct the lives of those who left and those who stayed. Tracing her family’s story through the Cuban Revolution, migration, and the legacy of slavery, she explores how political upheaval enters the most intimate corners of family life. Both a personal reckoning and a powerful work of history, this moving memoir examines the enduring bonds of kinship, the meaning of home, and the stories we inherit.

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