On the day in 1853 when Franklin Pierce was inaugurated as president of the United States, his vice president, William Rufus King, took the oath of office remotely—from his sugar plantation in Cuba, where he was dying of tuberculosis. An Alabama cotton planter, King also owned an estate on the island and was resting there in the hopes (which proved futile) that the tropical air might cure him. As Ada Ferrer writes when recounting this anecdote in her awe-inspiring, Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Cuba: An American History: “The story of the inauguration of an American vice president in Cuba is unexpected” (P. 109).
I’ll say! As the holder of an advanced degree in U.S. history, I would like to think I know a little bit about the twists and turns of American designs on Cuba, but I must admit I did not know this story. As Ferrer goes on to explain, “the spectacle of an Alabama slaveholder taking office as vice president of the United States in the heart of Cuban sugar country” is not merely a fun piece of historical trivia but exemplifies just how intertwined the island and its northern neighbor have always been throughout their respective histories, initially through the economic system of slavery and also through the persistent dreams of prominent Americans that the United States might one day annex Cuba as a territory (Pp. 109-10).
In the prologue, Ferrer aptly describes her book as “a history of Cuba that functions also as a kind of history of the United States” (P. 6). The book’s organizing theme is the two-way (if “uneven”) relationship between the two countries (P. 3). Today, decades into the post-revolutionary period, the full complexity of that relationship has been obscured in popular understanding. While many Americans may recognize the influence of U.S. policy on Cuba, Ferrer posits that they are unaware of Cuba’s full significance as a reciprocal influence upon U.S. history: “The exigencies of the Cold War meant that for decades Americans generally understood Cuba primarily as a small—if dangerously proximate—satellite of the Soviet Union” (P. 5).
Ferrer’s magisterial work includes an excellent overview of the relevant Cold War history, but also makes clear that the 1959 revolution can only be fully understood within the context of the full sweep of Cuban history. The book is panoramic, chronicling Columbus’s arrival, empire and slavery, the Spanish-American War, Fidel Castro’s rise to power, the fall of the Soviet Union, and Castro’s death in 2016. While accessible to a general readership, it also serves as a helpful synthesis of the literature for scholars who are not Cuba specialists.
It is also beautifully written. Ferrer, who emigrated from Havana to the United States as an infant, weaves into the narrative pieces of her own family story, but only intermittently and always in an inobtrusive and enlightening manner. Thus, beyond its Cuba-specific insights, this book also offers a model for how to incorporate a personal voice into scholarly writing.
Cuba is packed with rewarding insights for many different audiences and types of readers. I myself enjoyed and learned a lot from the book on many different levels. In the remainder of this jot, however, I want to highlight two reasons why I found the book thought-provoking on a professional level, as a law professor and legal historian of the twentieth-century United States.
First, the chapters on twentieth-century Cuba, from independence and the transition into a republic through the Castro revolution, are packed with legal and constitutional history. Because I teach constitutional law courses covering the Fourteenth Amendment, which contains the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment, I was especially interested to learn more about Cuban efforts to write equality into foundational legal texts. Cuba’s 1901 constitution declared: “All Cubans are equal before the law.” But the 1940 Constitutional Convention added a provision criminalizing discrimination: “All discrimination due to sex, race, class, or any other motive harmful to human dignity is declared illegal and punishable. The law will establish sanctions for those who violate these norms” (P. 254). Black Cuban leaders argued that a formal declaration of equality was insufficient without an explicit commitment to enforcement. Even with that additional language, this and other progressive provisions still went largely unenforced, although Ferrer notes that the 1940 constitution “became an outsized presence in Cuban politics”; leaders—including Castro—rallied support by trumpeting “their commitment to making it real” (P. 258).
After the revolution, communist leaders sought to mandate equality even within the most intimate relationships. The 1975 Family Code, for example, defined marriage to require “equal rights and duties for both partners” and required families to divide household tasks “according to the principles of socialist morality” (P. 390). It will probably not surprise Jotwell readers that such decrees did not produce marital utopia, but Ferrer includes fascinating material about how Cubans debated, questioned, made sense of, and lived under such reforms. The revolution prompted “abstract debate about human nature itself”—could the state turn Cubans into “new people,” liberated from all of their traditions?—as well as a variety of more specific debates about “concrete government policies on labor, education, and the economy” (P. 395).
These examples are just two of many episodes that made me eager to think about how my teaching on U.S. legal history could be enriched by assigning students some comparative reading from other legal traditions. Second and more generally, the book prompted me to wonder what U.S. legal history might look like if more of the research in the field was pan-American in scope. (To be sure, there are many historians who do take transnational perspectives, but my own work has heretofore been fairly parochial; as Taylor Swift would say, “I’m the problem.”) What U.S. legal histories, I wonder, might we write through the histories of other countries (and vice versa)? That question is among the many that this book left me with, and I finished reading newly energized to expand my own horizons as a legal historian.
Editor’s Note: Reviewers choose what to review without input from Section Editors. Jotwell Legal History Section Editor Sara Mayeux, had no role in the editing of this article.
