Cuba: An American History

In March 2016, President Barack Obama became the first American president to travel to Cuba since the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The trip was the culmination (so far) of an effort by the two governments to normalize relations after more than half a century of conflict and enmity. Ada Ferrer, a leading historian of Cuba, reflects on the ways in which a dynamic understanding of the history of Cuba, and of its long and complex relationship to the US, informs both the real possibilities and dangers attendant on the current moment of rapprochement. 

Ada Ferrer is Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. She is the author of two award-winning books, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (UNC Press, 1999) and Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 2014), which won three prizes from the AHA, as well as the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance.  She is currently writing a history of Cuba to be published by Scribner. 

The seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.