When Barack Obama met Raúl Castro, in an attempt to re-forge friendship, he stressed continuities that bind Cuba and the U.S. His claim that the same ideals inspired both can probably be dismissed as rhetoric. He surely spoke from the heart, however, when he averred, with only a little exaggeration, that “like the United States the Cuban people can trace their heritage both to slaves and slave-owners.”
The most conspicuous links between the two countries, however, have been political and paradoxical: Cuba has spent its entire existence as a state and much of its late colonial past in Uncle Sam’s purported backyard, threatened with annexation or subject to domination, economic exploitation or enmity. On the other hand the U.S. has harbored most of the exiles who conspired and fought for what Hugh Thomas, in the best history of the island, called Cuba’s “pursuit of freedom.” As in much of the Americas, the U.S. in Cuba has been a benign example and a malignant master. Ada Ferrer’s “Cuba: An American History” focuses on the equivocal relationship of the two countries, and presents it convincingly as symbiotic.
