ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
At the start of the Cuban Revolution, Adela Ferrer made an impossible decision. Her husband had fled Havana for New York, and she planned to take her two children and join him. But her first husband, still in Cuba, forbade her from taking their 9-year-old son. So she made the agonizing choice to take only her 10-month-old daughter. In her new memoir, that daughter, Ada Ferrer, describes the moment her brother, Poly, found out he'd been left behind.
ADA FERRER: When Poly said goodbye to his friends and returned home for dinner that April evening of 1963, he found my mother and me gone. My grandmother and aunts told him that we had traveled to the countryside for a few days to help care for an ailing relative. So in the beginning, he wouldn't have been too worried. Less than a week after our departure, however, they told him the truth. Every night, Poly clutched my mother's house dress and cried. He was one month shy of 9 1/2.
FLORIDO: It was a rupture that continues to haunt and define Ferrer's family to this day, the kind of rupture shared by so many families who fled Fidel Castro's Cuba. Ferrer's new memoir is called "Keeper Of My Kin: Memoir Of An Immigrant Daughter," and she's here to talk about it now. Welcome.
FERRER: Thanks for having me, Adrian.
FLORIDO: You say in your memoir that you devoted your life's work to writing about Cuba as a kind of penance for having been the chosen one that day in 1963. Why did you feel you needed to make amends?
FERRER: Well, you know, my life was so determined by the fact that my mother took me with her, that she brought me to the U.S. Meanwhile, my brother was back in Cuba without his mother. He was just traumatized by my mother's choice for his whole life. And so I felt like that moment represented, like, a kind of original sin - that my success, my flourishing, my everything came from my mother's decision to take me, which was a decision that also involved leaving him behind. So I felt guilty for being the chosen one.
FLORIDO: You pieced together a lot of the story of your mom's decision after she died in 2020, in large part through a box of letters that you found in her closet, the letters that your brother wrote to your mom after she left him behind. Could you tell me about the moment that you found those letters?
FERRER: Yeah, well, she died in 2020. My father died two years later in 2022. He was 101 years old.
FLORIDO: Wow.
FERRER: I was cleaning out the apartment, and I opened up one of the closets where my mother kept a lot of things. And high up on a shelf, there was a clear plastic box with a white lid, and I could see envelopes in it. So I brought it down. And there was a stack of envelopes, and they were all tied together with gold curling ribbon, the same kind my mother used to wrap presents at Christmas.
And so I untied them and took out the first one and saw that it was a child's handwriting and looked at the date, which was May 4, 1963. That was less than a week after my mother and I left. And so it was my brother's first letter to my mother. And he would continue to write letters at a pretty regular pace for a lot of his childhood, and readers will find out, if they read the book, that though my mother expected the separation to be short, you know, she thought that his father would relent once he saw that she had left with me, that - why keep him behind if he wasn't even caring for him?
But that never happened. The father never changed his mind, never let Poly leave. And so the reunion of our family, the reunification of mother and son didn't happen until 1980 during the Mariel boatlift, which saw about 125,000 Cubans arrive by sea in Florida in the space of about five months. So the letters go from that very first one, less than a week after we left, through 1979. So the letters are kind of a chronicle of his childhood without my mother, of his coming of age, of his young adulthood.
FLORIDO: Was it hard to read them?
FERRER: Oh, it was probably the hardest thing about working on the book because the letters are - they're just excruciating. The letters are the letters of a little boy. The handwriting is not good. The punctuation is not good. The spelling is a mess. And he is trying to make sense of what happens but also trying to be mature and grown up and kind of stoic, you know? So he tells her he's doing fine. But at the same time, these moments of utter pain come through.
And there was one phrase in a letter, maybe from 1964. I can't - you know, so we'd been gone maybe a year, maybe two. And he says, Mommy, if you only knew how happy I get when a letter arrives from there. He says, I get so happy that sometimes it makes me sad. You know? And so they were - I couldn't read them very much. I had to - I mean, I read them all very carefully, but I had to read them in short spurts because they were just so emotionally draining and upsetting to read. But I think of them as a gift, you know, that I have them.
FLORIDO: Your story is the story of one family's separation, your family's. But in many ways, it is the universal story - isn't it? - for a lot of Cubans.
FERRER: Right. And for many immigrant families, I mean, the - you know, every story is particular in its own way, but many of them follow a pattern, right? And in Cuba, there was a revolution. There was the fact that people couldn't go back because of the vagaries of U.S.-Cuban relations. Family separation is obviously not unique to Cubans, and there are people who make the difficult choice to leave their country all the time.
And often when they leave, few people have the resources for families to leave all as one, right? So there's always people who stay behind. And there's never really a guarantee that the reunification will happen or when it will happen. And so there is this kind of wake of family separation that shapes so many lives in the U.S., in Latin America and other parts of the world.
FLORIDO: You know, I recently lost my grandmother.
FERRER: My condolences.
FLORIDO: Thank you. Over the last few years of her life, I recorded her oral histories, and I'm so grateful to have those recordings. But every once in a while, I'll think of something, and I'll say, oh, I should have asked her that.
FERRER: Yeah.
FLORIDO: You know, and I wonder, if you could ask your mother just one more question, what do you think it would be?
FERRER: That's an amazing question. You know, I'm torn. Part of me would want to ask her how she would feel about my having written this book. But part of me doesn't want to ask her just in case.
(LAUGHTER)
FERRER: So that's one question, but apart from the book, I would want to ask her about when - you know, when she first got here, she always thought she would go back. I guess I would want to know more about the moment where she no longer believed that. When did she believe that she would be here until the day she died? When did she realize that, and how did it make her feel? And also I wonder, if she had known at the time that her absence from Cuba would be permanent, would she have made the choice she made?
FLORIDO: Well, I've been speaking with Ada Ferrer. Her new memoir is called "Keeper Of My Kin." She's also the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Cuba: An American History" and a professor of history at Princeton University. Ada Ferrer, thank you so much for this beautiful book.
FERRER: Thanks for reading it and for talking about it with me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
