Decades ago, Ada Ferrer learned a lesson about what she'd later call the 'misencounter between the history I was reading and the history of the people in my life.' During the late 1980s, while pursuing a master's degree in history at the University of Texas, Ferrer asked her parents to share their memories of events covered in her coursework. Did Adela and Ramon, who had emigrated from Cuba in the early '60s, remember the nation's constitutional convention of 1940' They did not. Had they attended Fidel Castro's massive rallies during the 1959 Cuban Revolution' They had not. Castro's agrarian reforms hadn't touched Ramon's family farm, which was too small to be confiscated; neither parent watched the leader's hourslong speeches, because they didn't have a television. Yet Ferrer's mother and father were profoundly shaped by the history they hadn't witnessed directly. So was Ferrer, who has devoted her life to studying the country where, as she writes, 'I was born but could not...
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