Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter
Cuba

Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter

by Ada Ferrer

Family & Heritage Non-Fiction Memoir History Family Saga 2026

Summary

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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About the author
Ada Ferrer
Ada Ferrer

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.

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Details
Published
2026
Author
Ada Ferrer