(bright music) - Ada, you were a very small child a few years after the Cuban Revolution, when your father left to go to New Jersey.

What was that like?

Why did your mother stay behind with you?

- Well, my father left in 1962, in April.

I was born two months actually, after he left.

So I was born in June of '62, and he just had the opportunity to leave.

He had decided a year earlier that he wanted to move to the US.

The opportunity came up.

The assumption was always, as it proved to be, that he would then get my mother and me to join him.

And we did a year later, in April of '63.

So I left Cuba when I was 10 months old.

We moved around a little bit, like, you know, a typical kind of immigrant story.

Since my mother and I left after the missile crisis, there were no direct flights, so we flew to Mexico first, and we were there for about two months while we waited for a visa to the US.

Then we arrived in Miami and came to the Freedom Tower, and then onto New York a couple days later.

- So Cuba was always a presence in your life and in Miami, to some extent also a part of your life?

- Yes, yeah, so, you know, I always say that Cuba was an absent presence and a present absence that, you know, growing up, you know, I wrote letters to my relatives in Cuba every Saturday.

My mother made me do that.

She wrote all the time.

There were phone calls, we had drawers in my bedroom that were for things to send to Cuba.

So Cuba was just everywhere.

It was this place that my parents for a long time thought that, you know, that we would all return to.

And then at some point that was no longer what they thought or what we all thought.

- And yet you've made Cuba the center of your scholarly life later in life, and you've been back and forth to Cuba often.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Obviously.

- Yeah, just at some point, you know, as teenagers or wont to do, you kind of resist what your parents impose on you.

So there was a part of me maybe early on that thought, enough Cuba, I'm tired of Cuba.

And I would, you know, in arguments with my parents, I would say, we don't live in Cuba anymore, right?

There was this kind of distancing.

But then I think by the time I just became increasingly interested in how we ended up in the US and, you know, part of my family stayed, part left.

Why did that happen?

And I think partly because I was born there, but had no memory of it, I just became interested in understanding what it was, and that this kind of budding interest then became a lifetime career.

- There's a long history of the United States, of the North Americans being engaged with Cuba and a long history of political exiles from Cuba in the US.

And your Pulitzer Prize winning book is called "Cuba and American History."

What do you mean by that, "The American History of Cuba?"

- Yeah, I picked that title in part because it's a little mysterious.

So I thought it would lead people to say, oh, what does that mean?

So it means several things at once.

One is that it is a history of this complex entanglement between Cuba and the United States, and that relationship and that entanglement goes back much further than people often assume.

So I also wanted it to refer to something else, namely that the US has played such a big role in Cuban history.

That to study or to narrate Cuban history is also a way to gain perspective on the United States, as I say, from the outside in.

So I wanted the book to also be a kind of, what I call a shadow history of the US, an outsider's perspective.

- So as a student of revolutions, the Cuban Revolution, the Castro Revolution, or as Cuban exiles tend to think of it as a Communist Revolution in Cuba.

The difference between that and the American Revolution, the French Revolution, which Castro Fidel studied.

He talked at one point, he says, we need many more Robespierres.

- Right.

- Right?

And of course, he studied the Russian revolution.

He's reading Lenin and he's reading Marx.

But what are the differences between the various revolutions?

- Oh, that's a complicated question.

I think in some sense, because the question asked me to hold the Cuban revolutionary steady as kind of one thing in one moment.

And we have to remember that it wasn't one thing, - You say that in book, no nation is ever one thing, which I think is wonderfully true.

- Yeah, and I think in some ways, if you think about the Cuban Revolution, starting from the period of struggle against Batista, going back to, you know, Batista staged a coup, an illegal coup in 1952, and Cubans mobilized against him, you know, not initially so much, but that it became a revolution against Batista by later in that decade.

So if you go back to that period, and then you'd take it to the present, right?

Because the system that was put in place by the revolutionaries still exists in some, not in exactly the same way, but it still exists.

So that's over 60 years.

And I don't think that you can characterize those 60 years as one thing.

- As all one thing.

- As all one thing, so, and one of the things that I liked, that I emphasize in the book is that we tend to think with hindsight.

So we call the revolution Castro's Revolution or the Communist Revolution.

But it wasn't those things initially.

And if you look at the 1950s, Castro was one revolutionary among many.

He ended up being the one, you know, in some sense the one left standing when other people were assassinated.

He also ended up being the one who amassed power following 1959.

But that wasn't preordained.

- Right.

- And also in the beginning, it wasn't clear that it was going to be, certainly in the 1950s when people were fighting against Batista, there was no indication that this was gonna be a communist revolution.

- We're sitting here in Freedom Tower, the 650,000 Cubans who came through this building and why it's called Freedom Tower.

- [Ada] Yeah, right.

- Their perspective, those folks, and they built a huge community here.

- And they built a huge community.

And I think one of, yes, absolutely.

And I was part of that movement.

My mother was part of that, my father, many, many relatives.

So I think part of it is that the turn to communism dismays more people and people leave, another major wave of people arrives from the mid '60s to the early '70s.

And a lot of those were people who had small businesses.

You know, the revolution had nationalized large businesses fairly early on.

In 1960, a lot of those nationalizations happened, but in the late '60s, and undertook something that it called the Revolutionary Offensive, which then nationalized things like, you know, little restaurants, even street vendors.

And so a lot of the people whose businesses were confiscated ended up leaving in that period of the late '60s and early '70s.

And the origin of many important Miami and New Jersey businesses, like the Versailles, you know, is in that period.

So that explains that other wave.

Then there's another wave during Mariel in 1980, where 125,000 Cubans take to the seas and arrive mostly in Key West.

And because I'm a historian (laughs), I always like to think about specifics and what produces a particular exodus.

That one, I mean, I think it's fascinating.

I had a brother who came during the Mariel boatlift.

That one came shortly after the beginning of family reunification trips.

So all those Cuban exiles who came in the '60 and '70s had never been able to go back.

So they'd never seen their family, they'd never seen the place where, you know, their homeland.

And in '78, '79, the two governments, the US and Cuba, allowed exiles to return to Cuba for the first time.

And many did.

And they came back to the island with all kinds of presents and money and pictures and stories.

And that created this kind of new desire among many to leave, to experience something new.

So that accounts for that wave.

There was another huge wave during the, what's called the Special Period, which is when the, after the Soviet Union collapsed, and there was a crisis.

And all this to say is that when you think about the Cuban exile story, it's important to remember that it's not just the story of the early 1960s, right?

That there were waves that kept coming, that have kept coming throughout.

- And, you know, the waves over the years have been extraordinary.

- Yeah.

- And in Miami and the rest of the United States, Cubans have created, Cuban exiles, Cuban Americans now have created a very successful culture.

They've been a very successful immigrant group.

- Yeah, you know, it's interesting because of course, you know, during the Cuban Revolution, there's been all kinds of hardships.

So for example, I am of the opinion that Cuban food and Cuban cuisine has survived much better in Miami than in Cuba, in part because it's harder.

I mean, it's harder to get the products there.

It's harder to get the spices.

So if you want a good Cuban boliche, which is the Cuban pot roast, I mean, you're much likelier, actually, you were much likelier to get it in Miami 30 years ago than you were in Cuba 30 years ago or Cuban now, or maybe even in Miami now, that's my opinion.

So, and then my, you know, my mother's been back many times, and my mother and I, so I've traveled there with my mother twice.

She left a son behind.

So she went during the family reunification visits in '79.

She went back in 1980 to pick him up during Mariel.

It turns out she got there and he had already left.

And then after that, you know, she was the one who always maintained, my father maintained that link too, but my mother, she would, you know, every time, 'cause they moved to Miami late, I grew up in New Jersey, but you know, they moved to Miami in like 1986.

So every time we'd drive around Miami, we'd see the Freedom Tower out our car window.

And she goes, "There's the Freedom Tower.

"That's where you and I arrived.

"That's where I brought you when you were one year."

You know, so she always told that story.

- In the book, you mentioned something that's kind of a startling fact because a lot of us who are interested in history of immigration, immigrant groups know of course that 1965 Lyndon Johnson, Congress passes the first really generous, if you will, liberal view of immigration.

But Johnson, you quote him saying at that ceremony in October of 1965, "I declare this afternoon to the people of Cuba, "that those who seek refuge here in America will find it."

That's kind of an extraordinary thing too, to think that that was what was on his mind.

- That was on, yeah.

- When he did that, the special place in a sense that Cubans had in this country.

- Well, the thing is, you know, I mean, Cuban and the US have always had this kind of unusual special relationship.

So in some sense, the story of Cuban migration is also, is unusual, really.

Because the Cuban Adjustment Act gave people credit towards residency, which then produced faster citizenship.

- Citizenship, right.

- And that was occurring in the same moment as the Voting Rights Act, right?

So, I mean, that's just that if you put the Cuban story in a broader American story.

- It epitomizes.

- It shines light on these epic stories of freedom.

But it also just really starkly illustrates these counterpoints, the limits, right?

The Cubans were getting the credits towards citizenship at the moment when African Americans were just getting the voting rights.

And that's part of the story too.

(bright music) (gentle music)