Ada Ferrer > Quotes

“When the friar answered that the good ones did, Hatuey at once answered that he preferred hell, “so as not to be where Spaniards were.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“But even when the names of Black fighters did not survive, stories of their exploits did. Half a century later, José Antonio Aponte, a free Black carpenter and the grandson of one of the Black militiamen who defended Havana against the British, painted pictures precisely of scenes like this, of Black troops taking British men prisoner, of military encampments guarded by Black soldiers. Indeed, Aponte would use those pictures to recruit Black men to a major conspiracy against slavery.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“In a few decades, the Indigenous population in Cuba declined by perhaps as much as 95 percent.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“Given the character, the mentality, the history of the people of the United States, Roosevelt actually did some wonderful things, and some of his countrymen have never forgiven him for doing them.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“As history makes people, so do people make history, reworking it, day by day, creating meaning of the world around them, often acting in ways that tend to fit but awkwardly in the categories of epic history.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“By 1530, the Indigenous population of Hispaniola had declined by about 96 percent.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“knew it. American intervention in 1898, then, was not to help Cubans achieve a victory over Spain. That was forthcoming, anyway. American intervention was meant precisely to block it.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“In 1905, US-owned mills in Cuba produced about 21 percent of the island’s annual sugar crop. The trend accelerated over subsequent decades. By 1926, seventy-five US-owned mills produced 63 percent of the annual Cuban sugar harvest.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“For Adams, as for most of his fellow statesmen, the question was not whether—but when—Cuba would become part of the United States. An American Cuba was inevitable, a consequence of the most elemental law of nature: gravity.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“The strengthened economic ties with the East—premised on the exchange of sugar for much more valuable things like oil—meant the survival of two longtime features of Cuban economy and society: monoculture and dependency. The future of the Cuban economy now looked like the past: sugar and more sugar. Before economic dependence had been on the United States; now the island became wholly dependent on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. So much had changed, but, still, the past—or parts of it, anyway—proved intractable.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“Martí wrote with special feeling about violence in the United States—against immigrants, labor leaders, Native and African Americans. In 1892, for instance, he described the public lynching of a Black man accused of offending a white woman: “The ladies waved their handkerchiefs, the men waved their hats. Mrs. Jewell [the man’s accuser] reached the tree [where the man was tied], lit a match, twice touched the lit match to the [petroleum-soaked] jacket of the black man, who did not speak, and the black man went up in flames, in the presence of five thousand souls.”5 In an American republic whose institutions he admired, this happened—not the work of one political leader, or a single villain, but of five thousand men and women who went to church, voted for their town council members, kissed their children good night, and watched a man be burned alive.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“The first recorded voyage to Havana occurred in 1572. Others followed, and by the first decade of the seventeenth century, Africans would represent almost half of Havana’s population.16”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“Today in Cuba, a small number of people proudly claim Taíno identity.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“The welcome and support Cuba offered these and other Black radicals from the United States, however, was not extended to its own Black activists”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“One report estimated that between 1959 and 1962, twelve thousand African Americans lost jobs to Cubans.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“Because sugar required massive amounts of labor, it was the major impetus to the transatlantic slave trade. Roughly two-thirds of the almost eleven million Africans forcibly landed in the New World ended up working in sugar.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“war required allies, preferably ones with deep pockets and powerful navies. To seek out such allies for the American Revolution, the recently established Continental Congress sent emissaries to Paris.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“One by one, the remaining Spanish positions were silenced, and by two in the afternoon, the Spanish had surrendered the city.25 Havana—Key to the New World—was now British territory, part of the same empire as the thirteen colonies.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“In the late 1850s, one Florida senator reported that US ships sailing to Angola could buy Africans for about $70 and then sell them in Cuba for almost $1,200.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“paraphrase the nineteenth-century Haitian historian Émile Nau. It is an impossible endeavor in many ways—we cannot simply slip into someone else’s place. But the attempt itself is essential. It has the potential to disrupt, if fleetingly, our assumptions about people, places, and pasts. It nudges us to glimpse the world differently, to grasp history on a more human scale, perhaps even to see ourselves through the eyes of others.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“in honor of Aponte and his companions was placed there in the 1940s, though it was stolen in more recent times. Among Black communities in Havana, his memory was kept alive from generation to generation. Afro-Cuban historian José Luciano Franco recalled that in the 1960s, stories of Aponte’s accomplishments—including his participation in the American Revolution—were well known in popular neighborhoods.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“But two facts are clear: it is impossible to understand the Cuban Revolution without understanding Miami, and it is impossible to understand Miami without understanding the Cuban Revolution.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“DESPITE THE INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING OF the American Revolution’s overtures to the Spanish-speaking world, Spain—the New World’s oldest colonial power—opted to support the hemisphere’s first anticolonial movement.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“Plantations kept growing in number and size, taking over more land and more forests, and consuming more and more African lives. What had been a society with slaves became instead a slave society, one in which the system of slavery left its mark on everything from political to social to economic to cultural life. In the process, the island of Cuba became not only a colony “equal in value to a Kingdom,” but also, increasingly, the apple of the eye of a young United States.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“The Cuban War of Independence—the third war in thirty years—seemed suddenly irrelevant, supplanted (like the Black officers suddenly demoted in favor of newcomers) by the Spanish-American War. That was the new name for the war, a name in which Cuba deserved not even a mention. In the struggle between Cuba and Spain, then, it was the United States that emerged victorious.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“At times, history proceeds as a contest between sweeping transformations and stubborn continuities. Events accumulate one on top of the other like palimpsests, layer upon layer, each leaving its trace for ones yet to come.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History