Okay, we're live. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show of a very special guest. Her name is Dr. Ada Ferrer, and she has just published a book on September 7th, 2021. Title of the book is Cuba in American history. It has excellent reviews on Amazon, well-deserved, and a really fascinating book. I learned so much about Cuban history and really how it is affected by the U.S.

So we can talk more about that, but Dr. Ferrer is the Julius Silver Professor of History

and Latin American and Caribbean History at New York University.

She is the beneficiary of the 20 of a 2018

Guggenheim Fellowship. She also has won many book prizes. One is the 2015

Frederick Douglas Book Prize for the best book on slavery. And also another

prize from the 2015 Frederick Cat Prize for the best book in Latin American

history and also the 2015 Wesley Logan Prize for the best book in Latin American history,

and also the 2015 Wesley Logan Prize for the best book on the African Diaspora from the H.A.

So she's won many, many prizes for her books.

Some of the earlier titles, one from 2005, is Insurgent Cuba, Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868 to 1898. And also in 2014,

Freedom's Mirror, Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. But again, we're going to talk

about this book. She just published, again, title is Cuba and American History. So Dr. Ferrer,

are you there? I'm here. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Well, thanks for agreeing to the interview.

For people who might not have heard your background, can you talk about your personal life

and your academic career and what led you to write this fascinating book,

in Cuba and American history?

Sure. Well, I was born in Cuba, and my family or my mother and I left in 1963.

And I grew up in a place that was mostly Cuban, Cuban immigrants, Cuban refugees.

And so I grew up hearing stories about Cuba all the time, living with the reality of family separation.

My mother had left my brother behind on the island.

...