A History of 'Utterly Ordinary People'

Ada Ferrer learned that her personal family history did not align with the historical events she studied academically. While earning a master’s degree in history, she asked her parents about major Cuban events from her coursework, including the 1940 constitutional convention and the 1959 revolution’s rallies, and received no direct memories. Her parents’ lives were shaped indirectly: agrarian reforms did not affect their small farm, and they lacked a television to follow Castro’s speeches. Ferrer later devoted her career to studying Cuba, becoming a Princeton history professor and Pulitzer Prize winner for Cuba: An American History. Her memoir Keeper of My Kin presents her family’s post-revolution experiences as the story of “utterly ordinary people” who felt history did not belong to them.

"During the late 1980s, while pursuing a master's degree in history at the University of Texas, Ferrer asked her parents to share their memories of events covered in her coursework. Did Adela and Ramón, who had emigrated from Cuba in the early '60s, remember the nation's constitutional convention of 1940? They did not. Had they attended Fidel Castro 's massive rallies during the 1959 Cuban Revolution? They had not."

"Castro's agrarian reforms hadn't touched Ramón's family farm, which was too small to be confiscated; neither parent watched the leader's hourslong speeches, because they didn't have a television. Yet Ferrer's mother and father were profoundly shaped by the history they hadn't witnessed directly. So was Ferrer, who has devoted her life to studying the country where, as she writes, "I was born but could not remember.""

"Recounting her family's experiences after the revolution, it is about "utterly ordinary people," she writes, "always on the margins, absent less as a matter of ideology than from an unconscious sense that history did not belong to them." The feeling of being buffeted by forces far outside one's control may seem familiar today, both in Cuba and in the United States-two neighbors undergoing destabilizing change."

Read at The Atlantic