The award-winning book is the result of 30 years of research and “a lifetime of change”, according to its author.
By Alas Tensas
HAVANA TIMES – Ada Ferrer, a Cuban-American historian and scholar, won the Pulitzer Prize in the historical book category on Monday, thanks to her work Cuba: An American History.
The award-winning book is the result of 30 years of research and “a lifetime of changing perspectives between the country where I was born and the country where I made my life. It is both a story that I inherited and a story that I created from many other possibilities. It is, in other words, what I have done with my sometimes heavy heritage,” the author declares in the prologue.
Published by Scribner Books, it appears for sale on Amazon. The work is original in stories about Cuba, as it is also an autobiography and a critical look at the dispute between the island and the United States, nations where Ferrer was educated.
“I was born in Havana between the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. My father was in New York, having left the island a few months earlier. My mother gave birth alone and asked for a taxi to go to the Obrera maternity ward,” says the author.
The Pulitzer, dedicated to rewarding the best in journalism in the world, is awarded annually in the United States to also reward literary creators, historians and music composers. This year, Ferrer’s book shared the award with Covered by Night: A History of Native American Murder and Justice in Early America, by author Nicole Eustace, on a night in which the Miami Herald newspaper was also recognized in the News of Breaking News category and the Washington Post for their “powerful and lively” coverage of the assault on the Capitol American on January 6, 2021, as well as Ukrainian journalists for their work amid the Russian invasion.
Cuba: An American History, had been awarded a few days earlier, also in the historical book category, at the LA Times Book Festival in Los Angeles, which rewards the best titles of 2021.
The review on Amazon describes the work as “an ambitious and moving chronicle written for a moment that demands a new consideration of both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States”, which “explores the sometimes surprising, often contentious, intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States in Cuba, but also the many ways in which the island has been a recurring presence in American affairs. story that will give American readers an unexpected perspective on their own nation’s history and, in doing so, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba.
Ada Ferrer (Cuba, 1961) has been a professor of history and Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University since 1995. Her curriculum vitae includes the books Insurgent Cuba: race, nation and revolution, 1868–1898 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), winner of the 2000 Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and The Mirror of Freedom: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, as well as several awards from the American Historical Association.
——-
Learn more about Cuba here on Havana Times
