Guest Essay
My Father Wrote Letters to the Cuban Government. Here Is Mine.
By Ada Ferrer
Dr. Ferrer is a professor at Princeton University and the author of the forthcoming “Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter.”
Dear President Díaz-Canel:
Maybe you know who I am. A few years ago, I published a history of Cuba and the United States that was based on decades of research on the island. When it won an award, the book was reviewed in your official newspaper, Granma, which said that it was good on the 19th century but that my interpretation of Fidel Castro’s revolution was questionable.
On that point, many Cubans in Miami agreed. I was born on the island in 1962 and emigrated with my mother the following year. She left behind my 9-year-old brother, believing that we would be reunited in a few months, maybe a year or two at most. He didn’t join us until 1980, during the Mariel boatlift. My father, too, left a son in Cuba. It is a familiar story.
As an old man living in Miami Beach, my father, who had a sixth-grade education, discovered that he loved to write. He wrote poems and autobiographical sketches. He drafted political proclamations, most of which I did not agree with. He also composed letters to Fidel.
In the first, dated April 19, 1993, he wondered what a letter from a humble Cuban who had left the island more than 30 years earlier might signify for its famous and powerful recipient. He immediately answered the question for himself: “I think nothing.” He wasn’t sure Fidel would even read it.
Still, he wrote, and in missive after missive, he repeated, “It is time, Dr. Castro.”
For what?
He put it differently on every occasion: time to end the deception, time to leave the destiny of Cuba to young Cubans, time to abandon Communism or, as he wrote in 2005, time “to bequeath to history that gesture of greatness that will make you the bravest politician of all time.” He was appealing to Fidel’s sense of supreme self-importance. In all the letters, my father’s basic message was clear: It was time for change.
In the tradition of my father, I write to you now. I realize that you might not want change; after all, your slogan when you were handed the presidency in 2019 was “Somos continuidad” (We are continuity). But unless you are completely isolated, you must know that continuity is not what most Cubans want.
Surely, you have seen the indicators: estimates that between 40 percent and 89 percent of Cubans live in poverty. A five-pound package of chicken can cost a retiree two or three times her monthly pension. You have electricity, but you know that blackouts are relentless and people go 10, 16, 22 hours, and sometimes days at a time, without it. Hospitals have trouble powering incubators or dialysis machines or even the old fans in their perpetually losing battle against the heat. Your health minister has said that 70 percent of basic medicines are not available. Outside, mounds of garbage run together, like ramparts rising around a crumbling fort.
For you, sir, continuity may be a political slogan. For many ordinary Cubans, it feels like a death sentence.
Yes, I know. The embargo. It makes everything so much harder. You can’t trade with the United States, the country that geography suggests should be your natural trading partner. American tourists can’t descend on your beaches. Worse than that, U.S. law punishes third countries, foreign companies, even vessels that do business with Cuba. Your designation by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism makes international financial transactions nearly impossible. Lately, the sanctions have been crueler than ever.
Yet there are so many things the embargo cannot explain. It did not force the government to stall the economic reforms promised in 2011. Neither did it determine the shape of the disastrous currency restructuring that sent inflation into triple digits in January 2021. Nor is it a sufficient answer to the question of why you have sharply increased government investment in tourism, even though most hotel rooms go unused and so much agricultural land sits idle.
The embargo does not explain the surveillance and harassment to which you subject people like Alina López Hernández, a historian who holds silent vigils once a month at Liberty Park in the provincial capital Matanzas, often carrying a blank sign to symbolize the absence of basic freedoms. It does not explain why artists such as Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Osorbo languish in prison for their art, their voice, their example.
You condemn the embargo all the time, blaming it for everything that is wrong in Cuba. But complaining cannot stand in for policy. Tell me, or better yet tell the Cuban people, what is your plan to deal with the fact that the embargo exists? What is your plan for trying to negotiate its easing?
Do not take this letter as a defense of U.S. policy toward Cuba, much less a call for military intervention, which I do not support. My father wrote letters to the presidents of the United States, as well as to Fidel. My equivalent would say something simple: Cuba is not yours for the taking.
That, at least, is something on which we can agree. In fact, when I hear President Trump say that he’s going to take Cuba, that he can do, frankly, whatever he wants with it, I bristle. He reminds me of James Buchanan, who, as secretary of state under President James K. Polk, wrote in 1849: “Cuba is already ours. I feel it in my fingers’ ends.” I can’t help but think of José Martí’s warnings about the United States, how it was ready to swoop down, take Cuba and then extend its reach into Latin America.
My students read the Platt amendment, that humiliating law that gave the United States the right of intervention in Cuba. I tell them about Juan Gualberto Gómez, the journalist and politician born to enslaved parents who warned that granting the United States this right was akin to giving it “the keys to our house.”
When you say sovereignty is nonnegotiable, Mr. President, the historian of Cuba in me understands. But I also know that you and your government have cheapened the word, so much so that many young people hear it only as more of your prattle. You have brandished the word like a weapon to avoid grappling with more difficult issues. You have acted as if it were your singular achievement, when it has never been. You replaced dependence on the United States with dependence on the Soviet Union and, later, on Venezuela.
Without an external patron, Cuba is now imploding, and sovereignty begins to feel like an abstraction. You cannot eat sovereignty. And to survive, people must eat. To live, they must do more than that.
What will you do to help make that happen? What will you do to make things right by ordinary Cubans?
If you are unwilling to pursue real answers, if you provide nothing more than a ruinous continuity with no future, then as my father would have said, the hour has come.
It is time at the very least for a true national dialogue.
******************
Facebook response from a leading Cuban intellectual and former ambassador
a letter to President Trump in the Times.
Both countries are responsible for the current impasse and widespread suffering and must climb down from their self-righteousness and ideological rigidity. They should start by returning to the first year of Trump's first term. Cruises, remittances, cultural and educational exchanges, bilateral agreements, banking procedures, investment experiments from the US side. More space for political debate and release of July 2021 nonviolent protestors by Cuba.
That creates trust and opens the door for the end of the embargo and return of Guantanamo by Washington. Havana can respond by adoption and adaption of Viet Nam's market economy with socialist characteristics and integration into International Financial Institutions.
Political evolution becomes natural, perhaps fulfilling Mariela Castro's analysis that with no embargo there is no need for a single party system.
https://cubapeopletopeople.blogspot.com/2026/04/whither-cuba-and-us.html
