This is Writer’s Voice, compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire and inform. The Cuban Revolution is often told through leaders, armies, ideology, and geopolitics. But history also happens inside families. In Keeper of My Kin, Ferrer tells the story of a family divided by revolution, immigration, and choices made under impossible circumstances. She also confronts the complicated legacy of the Cuban Revolution itself, including its changing ideals, its achievements, its repression, and the damaging role of United States policy. Then Writer’s Voice turns back to Cuba before the revolution, when American mobsters allied with dictator Fulgencio Batista and dreamed of making Havana the center of a global criminal empire. We revisit my 2008 interview with journalist T.J. English, where he explains how the Mob built its casinos, corrupted politicians, profited alongside American corporations, and helped create the conditions for its own expulsion by the Revolution. Ada Ferrer on Keeper of My Kin and T.J. English on Havana Nocturne, on Writer’s Voice. Thanks for joining us. I’m Francesca Rheannon. Ada Ferrer is a historian of Cuba. In her memoir, Keeper of My Kin, she turns the historian’s eye toward her own family and toward a separation that shaped all of their lives. In April 1963, four years after Fidel Castro took power, Ferrer’s mother left Cuba with ten-month-old Ada. She left behind her nine-year-old son, Poli, whose father would n ot permit him to emigrate. The family believed Poli would soon be allowed to follow. Instead, he remained in Cuba until the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Ferrer grew up with Poli’s photograph on her mother’s dresser. She kissed it and imagined an older brother she would one day know. But the young man who arrived in the United States had already been deeply wounded by abandonment, addiction, and disappointment. After her parents died, Ferrer found the letters Poli had written to their mother as a child. Through them, she began to see the frightened boy inside the troubled man.Writing Keeper of My Kin allowed her to preserve that history and to understand how revolution, migration, and family love can become entangled across generations. Let’s listen now. [Francesca] Ada Ferrer, welcome to Writer's Voice. [Ada Ferrer] Oh, it's great to be here with you, Francesca. [Francesca] This wonderful memoir begins with a revelation that you learned as an adult, that when your mother left Cuba in April 1963 with 10-month-old you in her arms, she left without saying goodbye to your half-brother, nine-year-old Poli. She never told him, in fact, that you were going. Tell us what happened. [Ada Ferrer] Yeah, so we were living in Cuba. It was four years after the start, after Fidel Castro took power. And my father left for the U.S. when my mother was pregnant with me. She was seven months pregnant with me. And he left and immediately began paperwork to get us to the U.S. to join him. My mother had a son, my half-brother, Poli, from her first marriage. And Poli's father refused to let him leave. He was a member of the Revolutionary Police. He thought it would look bad if his son left for the U.S. I think he also was a vindictive man and enjoyed making my mother suffer. And he refused to grant permission for him to leave. My mother and everyone in the family, her mother, her sisters, et cetera, all believed that when my mother and I left, that Poli's father would relent and give him permission to leave. So the departure, I mean, it was so hard for my mother to make that decision. People shouldn't have to make that decision. But she thought it would be a temporary decision, that it would be reversed because my brother would soon join us or because we might end up going back to Cuba. It was never meant to be a permanent separation. And so she decided, you know, it was a different era. No one in my family went to therapists or anything like that. No one talked about trauma and psychology in the way we might now. And they all decided that it would be easier if she didn't say goodbye, that he would get really upset, that it would create a huge scene, that my mother in that context might not be able to leave. So they decided that that we would leave and that they would tell him after the fact. And they trusted that it wouldn't last that long, that he'd join us soon. And with and with him joining us, that that act would be kind of erased or minimized. [Francesca] And yet that really didn't happen for a very, very long time. You write that you grew up always aware of his existence, Poli's existence and his absence, that he was both never with us and with us all the time. What was that like to grow up with your younger sister as the chosen children and you really the chosen child in the sense that that your sister hadn't been born yet with this invisible older sibling haunting the family life? [Ada Ferrer] It was I mean, for me, I don't know that as a child, I don't know that it was just normal. It was just the facts, you know, that my mother talked about Poli all the time. She talked about her mother and her siblings. So they were always a part of our family. And I understood them as part of our family. But, you know, as I said, they were never there. So it was they were just there as kind of, yeah, as these kind of haunting presences. Right. There were there my brother's picture on my mother's dresser all the time. I used to kiss it. But we always bought things that my mother figured out ways to send to Cuba. She sent letters all the time and we would write little notes on the bottom. When their letters arrived, she would read them out loud to us. So they were always there. And the assumption was that we would be together again soon. So I loved him from a distance without knowing him. And I think for a long time, I imagined that we would be together again. And as I grew older and I was a teenager and, you know, I would read novels and watch TV. And I thought he was you know, I wished he was my older brother who had cute friends. I would get crushes on. You know, it was that I imagined him that way. And of course, it didn't turn out that way. [Francesca] No, the reality was quite different. After both your parents died, you found a bundle of his letters tied with a gold curling ribbon that he had written to your mother beginning just five days after she left, which you hadn't previously known existed. And you describe reading them as so excruciating that you could only take two or three of them in at a time. What was in those letters that made them so hard, so painful to read? [Ada Ferrer] Well, they were letters written by a little boy who had just lost his mother in a sense or lost his mother's presence. Right. So he was nine years old trying to make sense of it. He's writing her these letters and he's using formulaic letter writing. You know, I hope that when you receive this, you are doing well. You know, that kind of old-fashioned convention, which he wouldn't have known on his own. My aunt would have taught that to him or he would have copied it from my mother's letters. So he's trying to be... First of all, you see the letters and the handwriting is a little boy's handwriting. The punctuation is terrible. The spelling is bad. The handwriting is kind of messy. So right away, just physically, they are letters written by a little boy. And he's writing as if he's trying to comfort my mother. So I'm okay. I'm doing okay. I go to school every day. I'm eating well. I got my haircut, that kind of thing. But then you get these moments where other things kind of come through unexpectedly. So when he talks about... It takes him a while to admit that he misses her, but he talks about missing me. He talks about how he bought this little elephant figurine to give to my mother for Mother's Day, but then she left. So he had to give it to our grandmother instead. You know, there are these moments like that. And sometimes he'll just say, there's one letter in particular that I just... And it was already, I think he wrote it in... I can't remember now whether it was 1964 or 1965, where he said, when a letter arrives from there, I get so happy that sometimes it makes me sad, you know? And you just imagine a little boy reading his mother's letter and seeing... You know, she sends him all her kisses and love at the end of the letter, but it's just words on a paper, on a piece of paper. [Francesca] Yeah. He's one of the most morally complex figures I've encountered in her recent memoir. You write at times that you wished he would die and you feared him for decades. He told your mother shortly after his arrival, just as you ruined my life by leaving me in Cuba, I'm now here to ruin yours. He did move to the United States on the Mariel boat lift. Yet you feel clearly, speaking to you now and reading in your memoir, you felt tremendous passion for him. How do you reconcile him as a figure in your life, the difficulties? And yet he certainly mellowed. He took care of your mother. Both your parents lived very, very long lives. And he took care of your mother in her last years. Not exclusively, other people helped, but he did a lot. So talk about how you have come to understand your brother and his history and his behavior. [Ada Ferrer] Yeah, I mean, I think he's a tragic figure. And when he came to the U.S. finally in 1980 during the Mariel boat lift, it was the year he turned 27. He was already a damaged young man. He'd already become addicted to alcohol while in Cuba. And he'd never been able to hold a job in Cuba. He hadn't finished school. He kept getting left back at fifth grade and never actually made it to sixth grade technically. So he struggled quite a bit. He came already with such a difficult background. And, you know, I think in Cuba, he'd been waiting his whole life to get here. It's almost as if his life in Cuba didn't count. He was waiting for his life to start once he got here. And then he got here and I think he was just very deeply disappointed. It wasn't what he expected. The relationship with his mother wasn't what he expected. His sisters were jabbering away in English and he couldn't understand them. We were unfamiliar. And he was so unfamiliar to us. And he started then getting in trouble here. And and he became violent. And he did try to beat me. I mean, he started beating me up once when the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college. And, you know, he used to threaten violence. He would say he would kill my parents and then kill himself. You know, he was a very troubled person. And I became terrified of him just as my sister was terrified of him. My mother's fear was more complicated. She was fearful. She was deeply guilty. She deeply loved him. It was all those things at once. So I'm not sure in the end that I can reconcile him exactly. You know, I think late in his life, he, you know, as you said, he became much nicer to my mother and he would bring her little presents and come see her sometimes on Sunday. And so he was less difficult at the end. But my sister and I never completely trusted it because he could be so volatile. We never knew whether it was going to last or whether he'd revert to his old ways. And so I just have to admit that. Well, first of all, I couldn't have written this book if he was still alive. I would be too scared to. And I also recognize that if he was still alive now, he would be my burden, my sister's burden. So it's complicated. It's complicated. It's so complicated. But yet I do love him. And writing this book, in a sense, has made me love him even more, right? Because reading those letters, I mean, they were excruciating. But in some sense, all I had before was, you know, if I had to think about him in Cuba, I had to try to imagine it. And I still have to imagine it. But now I can imagine it on the basis of his own words and what he said and what he wrote to my mother. [Francesca] And I mean, he clearly saw himself as traumatized. And this is really a story of, it's an immigrant story. It's a story of political circumstances, dividing families. This is an experience that is so common to so many families. You talk about your family as both part of historical events, but also tangential to them or marginal to them in a certain way, like so many ordinary people are. Explain what you mean by that. You are a historian, a historian of Cuba. So you can really put this personal connection within a historical context. [Ada Ferrer] Yeah. So as you said, I'm a historian and I've been researching and writing on Cuba for decades. So as a historian, I'm always drawn to histories that focus on ordinary people, history that's told in a way to put it very simply, history that's told from the bottom up, the experience of ordinary people in the midst of great historical events. So that's how I think about history. It's how I try to conceive it. So there's a way in which I've been looking at Cuban history for so long and trying to do that. And yet my family is part of that ordinary. They're part of the ordinary people of Cuba and of the US. So I had this conviction that they were a part of history, right? Because history, 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? All that owes something to the broader historical context. So anyway, I had this conviction that my family is part of that history. It's part of the history of the Cuban Revolution. It's part of the history of US-Cuba policy or relations. It's part of the history of US immigration policy. But at the same time, I think my parents and people like my parents don't often think of themselves as a part of history. They think they're not important enough or they don't matter. And history happens over there, and they're just over here living their lives. But people over there living their lives are part of history. [Francesca] Your father wrote letters to Fidel Castro, so he must have thought in some way he wanted to be part of history. [Ada Ferrer] Yeah, I think he did, especially the older he got. You know, he had a sixth grade education, like my mother. They were both very, very smart people. And in his 70s, he just began writing. He wrote letters to politicians, letters to media personalities. He wrote political proclamations. A lot of them sound like old-fashioned Cuban radio. I think radio was really big in Cuba, and people used to listen to radio all the time, including my parents. And some of the tenor of his political proclamations sound like that. But yeah, he wrote letters to Fidel Castro, to all kinds of people. He also wrote poetry and autobiographical material. And then he also began writing letters to a son that he had, another half-brother that I did not find out about until I was an adult. And those letters to his son, Juan Jose, whom I came to know fairly well, became kind of, I think, a highlight of his life in old age, receiving the letters, writing them. [Francesca] It was a very beautiful part of the story. They almost alter egos, the two brothers, your two half-brothers. You know, you and Juan Jose instantly fell in love, not in a romantic sense, but fell in love with each other, felt a connection. He was everything that Poli was not. How do you feel about that? [Ada Ferrer] A little guilty. I feel a little guilty. But it's also the way I feel. You know, Juan Jose, and it maybe says something about the way that mothers and fathers are treated differently in a patriarchal culture, right? That a father can abandon his son, but if he's with his mother, the trauma is perhaps not as deep as if a mother leaves, right? I think it does say something broader about the way society treats mothers differently than fathers and has different expectations for women than for men. So I realize that. But anyway, Juan Jose and I just immediately, he was a rural school teacher and loved to read, and he loved to write, and we didn't agree on everything. We had heated political discussions sometimes, but I connected with him, and I'm really close to his family now. Even after, should I give this away? I don't know. But after he died, after he died, I'm still very much in touch with his children, my niece and nephew, and with their children. And so today I just talked to Juan Jose's granddaughter, and I was about to call his son, but I decided he's in Spain now. He just moved to Spain about a month ago and decided it might be too late. [Francesca] And so talking about disagreement, this was an interesting book for me to read because I went to Cuba in 1969-70 for the 10 million ton harvest. A harvest. Oh, wow. Were you in the Venceremos Brigade? I was in the first Venceremos Brigade, yes. And it was a very profound, life-changing experience for me to be in a country where billboards had morally uplifting messages, and they weren't urging you to buy, buy, buy. It was before the special period when the Soviet Union collapsed, so it was at a time when there was more material abundance. We were set to work, and I actually went back the following year and helped to build housing for people who were getting housing for free. The medical system still is one of the best in the world. So I've had a different view of Cuba's history than certainly you have. And you have written, I think, extensively about the history of colonialism and slavery, so you're very aware of the roots of the Cuban Revolution, the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and the history of La United Fruit and all that, and US colonialism there. So I just wonder, what kinds of disagreements did you have with Juan José? And also, how do you reconcile the positive and the negative of the Cuban Revolution? [Ada Ferrer] Yeah, well, that's a huge question. So I'll say with Juan José, there were so much we talked about, but he was not as vociferous a critic of US imperialism as I am. So those were the kinds of disagreements. So that was part of that. And then in terms of the Cuban, I mean, I think Cuban history is, I'm biased, but I think Cuban history is one of the most fascinating histories there is for many, many reasons. And I think the history of the Cuban Revolution is really interesting. And one of the things I tell my students is that when people think about, a lot of times, whether you're talking about the right or the left, when people talk about the Cuban Revolution, they treat it as one thing. They treat it as this thing that came to power in 1959. And because the state that exists is the direct descendant of that, they treat the whole period as the Cuban Revolution. And what I try to get students to do is to historicize that, because the Cuban Revolution in 1959 is not the same thing as in 1961, when Fidel Castro first declares it to be a socialist revolution. It's not the same thing as 1976, when there is a new constitution that's a socialist constitution. It's not the same thing as, you know, the 1980s after the Mariel boatlift or the 1990s and the special period, right? There's different moments, and it's not all the same thing. So, for example, in my class, I just finished teaching a history of Cuba class, and in their last paper, they had to answer, I gave them all the same question. I usually give them options, but I really wanted to try this with them. I said to them, you have to write a book about the Cuban Revolution. The title is the Cuban Revolution, comma, year, hyphen, year, put the beginning and the end dates. And they all gave all kinds of different answers. And I tried to tell them there's no right answer. You can have it. The point is to make an interpretation. And so that's what I try to do. And I think once you think of it that way, it doesn't become about reconciling good or bad. It's about understanding a very dynamic changing process. [Francesca] Say more about that, because, you know, for example, what are the different stages of the Cuban Revolution? And how much do you feel is, you know, what happened to Cuba is due to the U.S. embargo? How much is it due to the contradictions, internal contradictions of the revolution itself, the accrual of power? Yeah. [Ada Ferrer] I mean, again, this is like this. I could do a whole class on this. But basically, you know, there's a period leading up to Fidel Castro coming to power, right? So the revolutionary struggle in which Fidel Castro in the beginning is not the most important figure. He's one of many. Many of the people who support that process are explicitly anti-communist. The Communist Party in Cuba, which was called the Popular Socialist Party, didn't come out in favor of Fidel Castro's movement until March of 58. So it's a very complex process in which there are all kinds of activists involved. Fidel Castro emerges as the most important, appealing figure, but he wasn't the only one. And at that point, he's not publicly at all publicly socialist or even anti-American, or even, you know, he doesn't even talk that much about the U.S. in public at that point. Then the revolution comes to power in 1959. And that early period I call the period of radicalization in which this kind of multi-class ideologically diverse movement becomes a socialist revolution and state. And so that ends around 1961. You could take it to 62. Then the next period, do you really want me to do this? The next period I call the push for communism, which is, you know, the government is trying to accelerate the process of creating a communist society. So they institute a second, more radical agrarian reform. They launched something called the Revolutionary Offensive that targets private property and cities and so on. And then after the 10 million ton harvest, you get the period of institutionalization where the ties with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union become institutionalized, become much more dependent economically on Soviet aid. And then there's another, anyway, it's much more complicated than that. But basically the next, in the late 80s, there's an attempt to return to a kind of earlier idealistic moment of the revolution. But that process is cut short by the fall of the Soviet Union. And that's when you get the special period. And as you mentioned in passing, you know, Cuba was completely dependent on subsidies from the Eastern bloc. And when those dried up, Cuba was sent into a tailspin. And you had massive migration as a result. You had a reorientation of the economy towards tourism. You know, one of the things that the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union economically was premised on the trade of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil. Once that disappeared, there was no need so much to produce Cuban sugar. So you had the complete collapse of the Cuban sugar industry. There's a lot more I can say, but I'll just leave it there. And in terms of, you asked about what's to blame. I think it's both. You know, the U.S. embargo, I don't agree with this policy. It doesn't make sense. It hasn't achieved its objective in over 60 years. The current oil embargo is cruel. I don't agree with any of that. But the idea that the state of Cuba's economy is due only to that, I think it just doesn't hold up. There have been all kinds of economic decisions that have been made all along the way, including, you know, in the beginning, Fidel Castro wanted to industrialize Cuba. He gave up on that after the 10 million ton harvest and became completely dependent on the sugar for oil relationship that I think ultimately hurt Cuba enormously. There was a chance that economic reforms and starting around 2010, 2011, those were, for the most part, abandoned. And then there's, you know, political repression of dissidents and people who think differently and that I don't think can be explained by the embargo. Right. So there's a lot there. The truth is, though, that it's hurting terribly right now. And neither government is helping. That was a mini lecture. I'm sorry. [Francesca] No, I would actually love to talk more about that. But I do want to get back to your wonderful memoir, Keeper of My Kin, which is such an apt and wonderful title for a historian. I mean, I've always said that every family has this historian, but your family is so lucky to have a real historian. And so let's move to the United States. You talk about the Cuban exile community in what's called West New York, New Jersey. But that's what is it, Hoboken or? No, it's actually a town called West New York. In West New York, which is in New Jersey. It's a culture that's organized around a homeland that is both lost, constantly invoked, much like your brother, where, you know, your parents couldn't visit their dying relatives. What does that kind of suspended, unresolved grief do to a community over generations? [Ada Ferrer] Oh, that's a hard, that's a hard question. Um, you know, on the one hand, people live here, but never fully here. They're always imagining this other place to which they feel they still belong in some way. Right. So they're thinking about their relatives back home. They're thinking about returning. You know, this was a mostly working class community, but most people worked really hard to try to help the family back home. So they're here, but it's like they're not entirely, they're not fully here. They're not a hundred percent here. Part of them is always there. Now, I think it's different for most children of people like that. Right. So most people like me grew up hearing about Cuba all the time, but not feeling that same kind of deep connection. Right. So I think in some ways I was something of an exception because I did, but, or I developed it. But I think the thing that's important, one thing that's important to point out is that those communities are never static or stable. They keep being fed by new arrivals. And so the longing for Cuba, the obsession with Cuba, the concern for Cuba, the presence of Cuba keeps being, keeps being fed. Right. It's, it still remains, but the people who are keeping it going, aren't necessarily the same people. Does that make sense? Because there's so many new arrivals. It's not just that original exile community. Right. So if you look at South Dade right now, or I'm sorry, South Florida, the largest sector of the Cuban community is composed of people who arrived after 1995. [Francesca] You know, I think a lot of Americans have the idea that the people who came here were wealthy people who were relieved of their property by the Cuban government. I mean, that's really not true. Your parents certainly were not. They were described in the old archives that you found in Cuba as poor. You have certainly a multiracial family, although race is of course a social construct, so it means something different in Cuba than it does here. And you just said that you were the exception, that you made Cuba your subject as a historian and you went back to Cuba. You write about the sensation of realizing that you were in some sense the memory of people who had lived in Cuba decades earlier, because you had grown up with the songs and the culture and the habits and even the expressions, the verbal expressions of people who had left in the early 1960s. So tell us, how did you understand your relationship to Cuba then and how do you understand it now after decades, after having written already several books about Cuba? [Ada Ferrer] Yeah, I mean, you know, it took me a while to make it to Cuba. I think it was around the time my came to the U.S. in 1980 that I really began to think about going, I think, or around that time. And I tried several ways, including I went to meetings of the Brigada Antonio Maceo, which, you know, was the counterpart, kind of a counterpart to the Vencedemos Reggae, then I decided not to. And anyway, so when I finally made it, it was so intense to be there, you know, just, you know, I couldn't sleep by just seeing this place that had loomed so large in my life, right? You know, I don't think I have words to describe it, what it felt like. But the fact that I was also becoming a historian and getting a PhD and writing about Cuba meant that it wasn't just one trip to go see it or one trip for a re-encounter. I kept going and I went the following year and the year after that. And I've been there probably over 30 times by now. So I developed a relationship with the place, with family members. I made friends. I have colleagues there who I value dearly. I have a relationship with institutions there, like the National Archives, which is a place I love going to. So it's a place that continues to mean a lot to me and that I hate to see, I hate to see what's happening now. But I think part of it is just, I somehow can't give up on it, you know, sometimes, like even during the pandemic when I spent, I spent three years without going during the pandemic, and it just felt so long, like I hadn't gone three years without going, you know, I think maybe since the beginning, right? And so there's a part of me, and I'm starting to feel that way now again, but that I just need to go, I need to go see it. One of the things that's happened though is because I've been going for so long, my first trip was in 1990, so that was 36 years ago, is that you kind of make friends in waves. So I made a group of friends in the beginning. Some of the older ones have passed away. Some of the ones my age or thereabouts, who are now also older, have left the island, and then you make new friends, and then they leave the island. So there is the sense of making friends in waves. [Francesca] One thing that's really struck me about Cubans is the intense pride that they have in their country, whether they're revolutionary, you know, post-revolution Cuba or pre-revolution Cuba, almost more than any other culture that I know of. Why do you think this is true? [Ada Ferrer] I don't know. The initial thing I thought is that, is it a pathology? It might be, I don't know, but I don't have an answer for that. I think you're right, but I don't know what the source is. One of the things that is interesting about it is that, you know, it's this island in the Caribbean. For an island in the Caribbean, it is very large, right? So it's not a small island in the Caribbean, but it's an island, relatively small compared to many other places not in the Caribbean. But it has this kind of outsized history. So if you think about the revolution of 1959, it had this enormous impact outside of Cuba and outside, you know, in the hemisphere, in the world, in the third world as a symbol of anti-colonialism, as a really important political symbol in the midst of the Cold War, right? It's a kind of reputation that you wouldn't associate with a country that's relatively small. So I think part of the answer may lie in its history, but I am biased because I am a historian. [Francesca] Well, I asked because I listened to a lot of Latin American music stations, and there's one that is Cuba and Beyond with Chucho Baldez. Yes. And I'm just struck by how many of the songs are about the places that people come from. [Ada Ferrer] Yeah. No, that's true. Even the famous, the most famous song, the classic Cuban song Guantanamera is about, you know, someone from Guantanamo, right? So the national anthem is called La Bahia Mesa, which is about Bahiamo, right? So there's a lot of example. Benny Morea, another one, Santos Aventuras. There's so many examples. You're absolutely right. And maybe Cubans think their country is special because of the music, not the history. [Francesca] It is wonderful music. It's true. Let's talk about the letters that, not just the letters, Poli's childhood letters to your mother, your father's letters to Juan Jose, Juan Jose's letters to your father, your mother's letters also. You write that they're the paper remains of something that should never have happened, and we've talked about what that is. What is it that you as a historian, that letters can do, that other forms of communication, even memory, can't? [Ada Ferrer] I mean, letters are wonderful. They're a historian's goldmine. They tell snippets of daily life. They capture in the moment things that might otherwise be forgotten. They also speak to the interiority, the mental state of the person writing it. So they can reveal so much. And when I was reading Poli's letters when he was a boy, even his handwriting sometimes could be evidence. Like he would be writing, and then all of a sudden he would cross something out, and then he would write in a different handwriting. And you could kind of imagine the emotion that he was feeling on having to write. So even something like that, they're a gift. And sometimes I wonder, because the story of family separation continues, right? People think about what's been going on now, and there's been a massive migration, or there was up until Donald Trump came to office, there was a massive movement of Cubans to the U.S. through the U.S.-Mexico border, right? And so the stories of people separated from their family has continued. But now there aren't really letters. There's just, there's WhatsApp, and, you know, and memes shared, right? So how do you, how will a future historian recover those? [Francesca] Exactly. No, I think that that's a really important thing to think about. Near the end of this memoir, Keeper of My Can, you imagine a conversation that you wish you'd been brave enough to have with Pauly, which was a direct acknowledgement that you were the chosen child, that he suffered. You feel that you owe him something, even though you were only 10 months old. So how did the writing of this book serve for you to resolve or reconcile your feelings about Pauly, about the separation, about your family? [Ada Ferrer] You know, it's so hard to say, because I do think, and I say this, I think, pretty early in the book, that I was always going to write this book, you know? And I tried writing a story about the family separation when I was a junior in college, you know, after I took my first trip to Cuba, I started writing this, I don't know what genre it was in Spanish about it. So I think there was always the drive in me. I don't know if always, but at least since after Pauly's arrival, right? Because after Pauly arrived, I could see what it meant. I could see what the separation did. And I could see the contrast between him and me. So at least since the time that Pauly arrived in the US, I feel like I had this drive to understand what had happened. So the book became one way of doing that. But I think it was also more than that. I think, I think it comes from a recognition of how much they suffered, how much my mother suffered because of her decision, how much Pauly suffered because of her decision and because of decisions he made later. So I think it was a way to kind of, maybe writing the book was a way of not losing that, of honoring them, you know, of honoring them, of just telling this really human story in which people are really complex, right? There's no angels and demons here. Like in some ways, you know, could my mother be painted that way for what she did? Yes, but she wasn't that. She wasn't that. And people don't know what they'll do unless they're put in a particular situation. Could Pauly be painted as a demon for the way he terrorized us? Well, maybe, but no, he wasn't that. He wasn't completely that either, right? So, so I think I just needed to write it down and I needed to, to have it out. And I needed to, I just didn't want to lose it. I thought like it was that they lived this story. If I didn't write it down, it would be forgotten in some way. And so this was a way of leaving testimony about their lives, about their suffering. But also, I think, especially in this moment, it's also making a point about immigrants in a moment where they are so demonized by our current government, right? That people don't leave their countries just because they want to, because they want to have fun, right? Like people leave because they feel they often, because they feel they have no choice and they often pay a very high price for doing that. And it is a difficult process in many ways. And the book acknowledges that. Whether I completely reconciled or whether, you know, I don't, I don't know. I do think that I understand everyone a little better now than I did before. I actually miss writing the book right now because I say it in the acknowledgements that, you know, every morning I would come into my study and just spend time with my parents, you know, which I've kind of, which was nice because I still miss them. So, yeah, so I miss, I miss working on it. [Francesca] Well, it's not just a beautiful book, but I also think, one, that while it is your family story, it has so many resonances with so many families. [Ada Ferrer] Yeah. [Francesca] Every family is complicated. There's estrangements and divisions and separations and many, many families. And I think beyond everything, what comes finally so clear in this story is the profound love that people have for each other in families, even when they have what appear to be irreconcilable differences. [Ada Ferrer] Yeah, I feel the same way. [Francesca] Well, thank you so much. It's been wonderful to talk with you and I'm glad we talked about Cuba as well. Ada Ferrer, Keeper of My Kin is your wonderful book. Thanks so much for talking with us here. [Ada Ferrer] Well, thanks for having me and thank you so much for reading the book. more than Havana’s casinos and nightclubs. It dreamed of controlling a country. Journalist T.J. English told that story in his 2008 book, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution. Under dictator Fulgencio Batista, Meyer Lansky and mobsters including Lucky Luciano and Santo Trafficante built a lucrative empire of casinos, hotels, nightclubs, prostitution, and political corruption. Havana became what English calls a “mobster’s paradise.” The profits flowed to gangsters, government officials, the secret police, and American corporations. But a revolution was gathering strength. The Mob’s plunder became a symbol of Cuba’s exploitation—and the gangsters failed to recognize the threat until the revolution was upon them. I spoke with T.J. English in 2008. For our radio listeners, here’s an excerpt from that conversation. To hear the complete interview, subscribe to our podcast or visit WritersVoice.net. [Francesca] (0:00 - 1:13) When I spoke to journalist T.J. English back in 2008, he had already spent decades following the fortunes of crime syndicates. He wrote about Irish gangsters in Paddywhacked, the Vietnamese syndicate in Born to Kill, and the Hell's Kitchen gang in Westies. Then he turned his true crime pen to a fascinating account of how the mob took over Cuba and then lost it to the Cuban Revolution in 1959. For our radio listeners, we play an excerpt from that interview. Subscribe to our podcast or go to Writer's Voice.net to hear the full interview. Let's listen now. Mob financial wizard Meyer Lansky engineered the fix, paying off Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and bringing his syndicate buddies Lucky Luciano and Salvatore Traficante in on the deal. They built posh hotels, casinos, and nightclubs like the famed Tropicana. They used them to skim huge profits, entertain the vices of U.S. politicians, and make deals with U.S. corporations like Pan American Airlines to fleece the crowds of tourists coming for fun in the Cuban sun. The mob hoped Cuba would become the hub of a global financial empire, but it was not to be. T.J. English's book is Havana Nocturne. T.J. English, welcome to Writer's Voice. [T.J.English] (1:13 - 1:14) My pleasure. [Francesca] (1:15 - 1:34) Now, in your book, Havana Nocturne, you talk about how the mob had always dreamed of one day controlling their own country, where they could have casinos, trade in narcotics, prostitution, and all the other ways they cater to vice. Why did they pick Cuba to do this? [T.J.English] (1:35 - 2:45) Well, part of that was the proximity of Cuba to the United States, the fact that it is just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, that it's a pretty easy jaunt to Cuban back for anyone from the eastern seaboard in particular, but pretty much anywhere in the United States. So that was one reason, but more importantly was the island of Cuba's history of dictatorship and repression and corruption, which had been a fact of life in Cuban political life throughout much of the 20th century. And so American mobsters who were particularly far-reaching in their thinking, people like Meyer Lansky and Charles Lucky Luciano and Santo Traficante and some of the others who were some of the guiding lights of the American mob, had this idea that if they could establish a relationship with a corrupt government in a place like Cuba, that they would have the political foundation to basically do whatever they wanted to do in that country. [Francesca] (2:46 - 2:53) And describe for us Havana of those days. Put us there, or maybe put us in one of the nightclubs that were run by the mob. [T.J.English] (2:53 - 5:42) Right. Well, by the time that the mob really realized their dreams for Havana, the plan that they had had for many decades, it came to fruition in the decades of the 1950s. And in that period, Havana became a kind of a paradise, a mobster's paradise. It all started of course with the casinos. Casino gambling became the engine that drove the whole operation. The money generated by the casinos, fabulous wealth generated by the casinos, it's like a license to print money. And in Havana there was no gaming commission or much regulation of the money coming into the casino. So the money came in and went into the counting rooms of the casinos. And from there it went right into the private bank accounts or the pockets of the mobsters. And it was distributed to corrupt political officials. It was distributed to members of the secret police in Cuba, whose job it was to keep the Cuban rabble in its place. And so that money was what made it all happen. But the money from the casinos was also reinvested in the nightlife in Havana, in the fabulous nightclubs like the Tropicana nightclub, the Sans Souci nightclub. These were beautiful, gorgeous outdoor nightclubs in Havana. And the Tropicana was the stage for the floor shows, was actually under the stars outside in the middle of a tropical jungle. It was very exotic. The nightclubs used a lot of Afro-Cuban culture, of course the music and the dance and the entertainment, which was very attractive and alluring and kind of exotic to the North American tourists and European tourists that went there. And stemming from that you also had prostitution, a very elaborate sexual marketplace that existed in Havana, starting with street-level prostitution and of course all manner of brothels, from cheap brothels to very high-class brothels. And beyond that, it's sex shows, live sex shows in places like the Shanghai Theater, which was famous for its body live sex shows, and also sex salons. You could go to a private home in a nice neighborhood in Havana and see an intimate sex show that you might even be able to take part in. So these are just some of the dimensions of what the mob had created as a kind of a, almost a kind of Venus flytrap for tourists and corrupt politicians and business people that came down to Havana in the years of the 1950s. [Francesca] (5:42 - 5:48) That's a wonderful expression, a Venus flytrap, with a little bit of a double entendre there. [T.J.English] (5:48 - 6:56) Yes, well I use that expression mainly in relation to the manner in which the mob would seduce and corrupt political and business figures. And this is so important to understanding how the mob operates. One of the attractions of Havana was that American politicians, senators, congressmen, powerful businessmen, would go down to Havana and they'd be treated like royalty. They'd be comped at the hotels and casinos. They had their pick of women while they were there, and many politicians partook of that. One in particular, a young senator from Massachusetts by the name of John Kennedy. The mob would extend a kind of what seemed like graciousness, free gifts. They would bestow all that they had to offer in Havana on politicians and businessmen. And it was all a way to make them beholden to you, to corrupt them, to seduce them. And that was a big part of what the mob was creating in Havana in these years. [Francesca] (6:56 - 6:58) And that's what we call a fix. [T.J.English] (6:58 - 7:27) Yep, the fix was in. The president of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, who was a very important partner in all of this, received a weekly cash payment of $1.28 million. That was his percentage of the casino skim on a weekly basis. And these are 1950s dollars, so I mean you can multiply that many, many times over to get at the kind of money we're talking about that was being generated there. [Francesca] (7:28 - 7:31) And you mentioned Kennedy. Why don't you tell us that anecdote? [T.J.English] (7:32 - 8:52) Well, Kennedy was there in 1957, young senator from Massachusetts. He was there with a group of politicians and businessmen. He was there as a friend of Senator George Smathers from Florida. It was Senator Smathers who introduced Kennedy to Lansky and Traficante in Havana, probably right out in the open. That also was part of the attraction of Havana, that you could go down there and rub shoulders with nefarious characters and underworld figures and it wouldn't get you in the kind of trouble it would if you did that back home in the United States. The story is that Traficante sensed that the young senator had a yin for the ladies, and so he set Kennedy up to have a tryst, an afternoon tryst, at a nice hotel in a nice neighborhood in Havana. The hotel is still there. I saw it when I was down there researching. What Kennedy didn't know was the room that he'd been set up in had a two-way mirror, and Traficante and an associate of his watched this tryst take place. And they talked about it often afterwards. Traficante told his attorney, Frank Regano, that he always regretted not having filmed it or photographed it in some way, because it would have made terrific blackmail material. [Francesca] (8:53 - 9:23) Well, you know, there's another very shocking, just to take a little digression here, there's a shocking revelation you make in your book. You almost kind of tuck it into a few paragraphs there, and that is that, as I have to say probably many of us have suspected for a long time, you say that there's some real indication that the mob was involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy. [T.J.English] (9:24 - 10:04) Oh, well, I'm not the first to point that out. I mean, that's a story somewhat separate from what I write about in this book, although I do mention it there at the end. I mean, I think part of the significance of this story of the mob in Havana in the 50s and the manner in which the mob was chased out of Cuba when the revolution took over is a key to understanding the animosity and anger and resentment that the mob would eventually feel towards Kennedy creating in theory, creating the kind of blowback that led to the Kennedy assassination. [Francesca] (10:05 - 10:24) You mean, well, of course the revolution happened quite a bit before Kennedy did. Are you saying then that the revolution, which was how the mob lost Cuba, you feel was connected to some of the policies that the Kennedys, through their party, was connected to? [T.J.English] (10:24 - 12:17) Well, not necessarily, but there is a sequence of events here. The mob loses Cuba in 1959. Kennedy becomes president in 1960. The Bay of Pigs invasion takes place in 1961. The exiled community in Cuba is very upset with the Kennedy administration. They feel that the Kennedy administration did not back up the invading army in the Bay of Pigs invasion and hung them out to dry. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy vows that Cuba will one day be free. The Kennedy administration begins a joint CIA operation called Operation Mongoose, which is devoted to the overthrow of Cuban revolutionary government, the assassination of Fidel Castro. Many of these same mobsters who were involved in Cuba in the 50s form an alliance with the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. We get into a whole netherworld of criminal activity here. At the same time, John F. Kennedy makes his brother Bobby Kennedy the Attorney General. Bobby Kennedy begins a crusade against the mob in the early years of the Kennedy administration. The mob is angry because they feel they played a role in getting Jack Kennedy elected president. A lot of this anger and resentment that's brewing the mob towards Kennedy, the mob towards Cuba, the Cuban exiles in South Florida towards the Kennedy administration, out of this smoldering stew of different political motivations, you get the events that lead to the assassination. [Francesca] (12:18 - 12:55) Well, let's go back to now, to before that time, go back to the subject of how the mob did take over Cuba for a while. Actually, I want to go back even a little bit further because you give some really fascinating biographical sections about the book, and you also talk about the development of the mob, which is so much connected in with some of these individuals you've already mentioned, Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, and Lucky Luciano, who you haven't talked about yet. Let's start a little bit with Meyer Lansky because he really seems to be the kingpin here. [T.J.English] (12:56 - 15:13) Yeah. Lansky is the architect of the plan that the mob had for Cuba, and he was the one that initially formed the relationship with Batista that made it all possible. Way back in the early 1930s, we don't know exactly why or how this came about, but Lansky set his sights on Batista. Batista rose to be the head of the Cuban military in 1933 at the young age of 32, and it was then that Lansky made a trip to Havana and paid a cash bribe in cash. We know this from an associate of Lansky's who described it in one of Lansky's biographies. He claims to have accompanied Lansky when they delivered a suitcase filled with cash to Batista in 1933. This was a bribe. In a way, it was Lansky making an investment in Batista at a very early stage, designating Batista as the likely power in Cuba for a generation to come. It was a smart bet. It would take decades for it to pay off because historical events kept getting in the way, but it turned out to be the key relationship that made everything possible. Lansky's a fascinating character. He, unlike a lot of mobsters, gangsters in the history of the American underworld, he kind of saw himself as a legitimate businessman. He was not a man of violence or not someone who committed violence with his own hands, although that's not meant to exonerate him. I'm sure Meyer Lansky was in on the decision-making process that led to a lot of mob assassinations over the years. For the most part, in his own personal and business life, he stayed above the fray. He interacted with politicians and other so-called legitimate businessmen, and that was the world that he preferred to circulate in. He also was very adept at making money for his partners. That was the key. That's why Lansky lived, unlike a lot of mobsters who wind up in prison or taken out, getting whacked, taken out in some kind of a mob hit. Lansky lived long enough to die of old age, and a lot of that was simply the fact that he made money for a lot of people over the years. [Francesca] (15:13 - 16:02) If you've just joined Writer's Voice, we're talking with T.J. English about his book, Havana Nocturne, How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution. Well, you point out how he was, you know, he was the businessman, he was the rationalist, the architect here. I found that one of the most interesting ideas in your book, and it made me think back to when The Godfather came out, the movie The Godfather, or the three movies The Godfather, and how I was impressed at that time with how the mob seemed to be a version of capitalism, kind of the underbelly perhaps, but really not that much different than any other corporation, except in the fact that it was illegal and directly murdered a lot of people. [T.J.English] (16:02 - 18:43) Right, yes, you're right, and I think perhaps we've lost sight of this in a way. Historically speaking, we forget how powerful the American underworld became, basically from the years of the 1920s when Prohibition gave birth to organized crime as we would come to know it, created this massive framework of crime, created a criminal structure in which the money from booze, in the case of Prohibition, but in later decades also from gambling and narcotics, would be used to influence the political system to corrupt law enforcement. This is the modus operandi of organized crime in the United States that existed for many, many decades, from the 20s right up until the 1990s. And in these years of the 40s and 50s, with people like Lansky and Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano and others, the mob came to see themselves as a budding multinational corporation. That's really how they saw themselves and they envisioned that there would come a time when they would have the power to influence elections. And that's part of what this operation in Cuba was all about, because Cuba was supposed to be merely the stepping stone, the first step in a kind of international framework where the mob would establish a base of economic power in places like the Caribbean and in South America and possibly in Europe. They would do it through the leisure industry, through casino gambling and things related to that. This would create incredible wealth that they could then use to influence the political structure. And yes, it was kind of very grandiose in scope and it was modeled basically on American corporate structure. Lansky and the others saw themselves as CEOs of a national corporation and ultimately, hopefully for them, a multinational corporation. In fact, there was a period in the American underworld where there was a violent separation between the new generation, the people like Lansky and Luciano, taking out the old world mobsters with roots in Sicily, kind of the more traditional mafia, Cosa Nostra, connected to the old country based on sort of a village mentality. No, the American version was to be a major corporation and the heads of the mob were to be like CEOs. So it was the taking of American capitalism and adapting it to the underworld marketplace. [Francesca] (18:43 - 19:12) Well, maybe that new mob has now become much, much diminished in size, but you've looked at other crime syndicates also. You've written about the Vietnamese. So do you think that this model of kind of the underworld, this shadow capitalism, is one that is still vital today and still kind of interpenetrates into the more legitimate power? [T.J.English] (19:13 - 19:46) Yeah, there's been books written about this. I think a lot of the, in the upper reaches of the underworld, the level at which organized crime has influence over laws and banking and all that kind of stuff, that to a large extent has been subsumed into the corporate, so-called legitimate corporate structure. And in fact, many of what were criminal rackets in the thirties and forties and fifties are now controlled in some way by the corporate world or by the government. I could go down a laundry list of things. [Francesca] (19:46 - 19:47) Yeah, give us an example. [T.J.English] (19:48 - 21:25) Well, when you were in the thirties and forties, if you were someone who lived in a neighborhood and you were of not great means and you needed some quick money, you went to a loan shark. Well, now you have a credit card. You go to the bank. The numbers racket, for instance, what they called the policy racket, if you wanted to play the number, bet on the number, you would do that with a local policy boss. Now you do it through the state lottery. The state government controls that. Narcotics, if you wanted to get high, if you wanted to soften the edges in your life, you would smoke a joint, do some heroin, buy some coke. Now America is hooked on pharmaceuticals so that they get prescribed to them by the doctor and the medical system and the government gets their piece of it. I would argue that many of the types of behavior that we used to designate as criminal activity when it was controlled by the criminals has now been legalized in some form or another and is regulated by the government and by private industry and they are the ones that make the profit. In the larger framework of corporate activity, this gets into a whole area of the degree to which corporations control the world economy in ways that the mob might have dreamed of. In many ways, a lot of the activities of the underworld during what they call the glory years of the underworld, the 30s, 40s, and 50s, have now just kind of integrated themselves into the so-called legitimate world. [Francesca] (21:27 - 21:58) Well, and now back to Cuba. Of course, part of the story, a very large part of the story, is not only what happened to, not only what the mob did in taking over Cuba, but also how the mob got overthrown in Cuba, the rise of the revolution. First, I'd like to ask you, is there a connection? Was there a way in which the control by Fulgencio Batista and the mob of Cuba actually heightened the contradictions brought about the revolution? [T.J.English] (21:58 - 24:13) Yes, yes, I think so, exactly. And that was one of the most fascinating things to me about researching this book and one of the reasons for doing this book, because it occurred to me that there have been many books and studies of the Cuban Revolution and there have been some things written about the mob in Cuba during these years, not much, but it always astounded me that these things were, the mob's exploitation of Havana and the revolution were unfolding at the same time, and yet historically we've always treated them as if they were sort of separate and unrelated events, and so part of the motivation of this book was to find the ways in which they fueled and influenced each other. And in fact, these two parallel stories are sort of unfolding on parallel tracks. You have the mob creating this empire in Cuba, in Havana, very specifically in Havana, while at the same time around the island, mostly outside of Havana, the revolution is brewing and gaining strength. And yes, I do believe that, you know, the Cuban Revolution, though it's a very complex event and is deeply rooted in Cuban history, it is true that the exploitation of Havana, what was taking the plundering of Havana, the turning Havana into one big bordello, as Castro sometimes referred to it, became a very powerful, motivating symbol for the revolution. There's no question about that. It came to represent a kind of capitalistic plundering of the island that the Cuban people had come to resent over the many generations. And you see this in a lot of the literature of the revolution and the communications of the revolution through rebel radio and everything, the references to what was taking place in Havana, particularly the relationship between the mobsters and the corrupt Batista regime and the American corporate interests, who were also benefiting from this tourism boom that was taking place, this mob-generated tourism boom. To the revolution, it seemed as though it was these three forces, the corrupt politicians, the mobsters, and the U.S. corporations were all one entity, that they were all in it together. [Francesca] (24:14 - 24:23) The United Fruit Company organized tourist junkets going down there. Was that right? Or Pan American Airlines, but wasn't United Fruit in on some of that? [T.J.English] (24:23 - 25:00) Well, United Fruit was a power in Cuba throughout the 20th century, a power in Cuba and in Latin America. They owned the sugar plantations that should control the sugar business. Pan Am was part owner of the most glorious hotel in Havana, the Nacional. And inside of the Nacional, you had a casino owned and operated by the Lansky brothers, Meyer Lansky and his brother Jake. So, you know, these are all examples of ways in which it seemed as though the American corporate interest and the mobsters were kind of benefiting each other in Havana. [Francesca] (25:00 - 25:23) You call it an odd quirk of history that the two most powerful forces behind the Havana mob, and that was Meyer Lansky and Fulgencio Batista, were born into dire poverty. Yet the man who brought them down, Fidel, was born into wealth. Is there anything beyond just coincidence in this? [T.J.English] (25:24 - 26:16) Well, it is a fact that you find throughout history often enough that the revolutions that are waged on behalf of the people, the downtrodden, the working class, the proletariat, are often organized and orchestrated by people from the educated class, from the bourgeoisie. And so that was certainly the case in Cuba. Castro, who had been born into wealth and lived a kind of life of privilege, became this advocate for the downtrodden in Cuba, whereas Batista and Lansky, who came from the downtrodden, came from poverty, became the protectors of the bourgeoisie in Cuba. It is interesting and it's a dynamic you see in other instances in history of revolution. [Francesca] (26:16 - 26:20) What do you make of that? [T.J.English] (26:20 - 27:24) Well, the only thing I can say is to create a kind of revolutionary fervor and to have the far-reaching sense of linking your revolutionary movement to historical precedent, it takes at least some people, someone, some leader with some kind of great historical background and sense, in other words, education. The thing about Castro was not only was he sort of have all these dynamic personal attributes, charisma, dynamic speaker, he was an intellectual. He'd done a lot of reading and he did his reading and most of it in prison while he was in prison. But he had an incredible wealth of knowledge, historical knowledge, philosophical knowledge, political knowledge. So it was that vision that I guess is you have to come from a kind of educated background to have a vision like that. Someone from that kind of background often winds up being in the leadership role of a revolution. [Francesca] (27:25 - 27:36) And what about the other side of that? The Meyer Lanskys, who maybe it's obvious that they would try to forsake the poverty that they came from and support the ruling class. [T.J.English] (27:36 - 28:57) I think part of coming from that level of poverty is, and Lansky said this in an interview once, that he vowed that he would never live in that kind of poverty again. And the whole purpose of his life became to acquire wealth, like the kind of wealth that he never had in his childhood. So it was driven by a kind of humiliation of being as poor as he was in his childhood. You know, the curious thing about Lansky is they said he would come to Cuba during these years. You know, the tourist season in the winter, our winter was the big time of year in Havana. And that's when Lansky would come down there for the tourist season and that he and the other mobsters took no interest in the poverty or the economic disparity in Havana, except as it related to the revolution, which was a threat possibly to their operations. But other than that, they had no interest. They had no social consciousness about the disparity of wealth in Cuba. They were there as predatory capitalists to make a buck. And they saw Cuba as a place to do that. And that became their Achilles heel in a way. Their inability to recognize that and to have a consciousness about that made it so that they didn't really see what was happening until the revolution was right in their lap. [Francesca] (28:58 - 29:09) Well, TJ English, thanks so much for talking with us here on Writer's Voice. Your book is Havana Nocturne, How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution.