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The Cuban Revolution transformed a nation. It also ended the Mob’s dream of turning Havana into the center of a global criminal empire. And it divided families.
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Writer’s Voice talks with Cuban American historian Ada Ferrer about her memoir, Keeper of My Kin. When Ferrer was ten months old, her mother carried her out of Cuba without saying goodbye to Ferrer’s nine-year-old half-brother, Poli. The separation was supposed to be temporary. It lasted seventeen years.
“We tend to think that history happens up here or something, but all these historical events, their geopolitical decisions, they reverberate in individual lives, at the heart of families, in these really intimate spaces, in the space between people, family members who are separated, right?” Ada Ferrer
After Poli finally joined the family through the Mariel boat lift, the wounded child Ferrer had imagined became a volatile and sometimes violent man. Years later, a bundle of his childhood letters helped her understand what the separation had cost him. Ferrer discusses immigration, exile, family memory, and the ways geopolitical decisions reverberate through intimate lives.
Then Writer’s Voice returns to a 2008 interview with journalist T.J. English about Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution. English describes how Meyer Lansky and other American mobsters allied themselves with dictator Fulgencio Batista, turning Havana into a glittering marketplace of casinos, nightclubs, prostitution, political corruption, and corporate profit.
“In that period, Havana became a kind of a paradise, a mobster’s paradise.” T.J.English
The Mob hoped Cuba would become the base of a multinational empire. Instead, its exploitation of the island became a powerful symbol for the revolution that swept Batista and the gangsters from power.
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[Episode 1035]
Tags: Keeper of My Kin, Ada Ferrer, T.J. English, Havana Nocturne, Cuban Revolution, Cuba, Cuban history, Cuban exile, Cuban immigration, Mariel boatlift, Mafia in Cuba, Meyer Lansky, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon,
You might also like: T. J. English, THE CORPORATION & HAVANA NOCTURNE, Katherine Paterson, MY BRIGADISTA YEAR
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