Last month, the New York Times published a “guest essay” by Ada Ferrer, a professor at Princeton University and the author of a history of Cuba that won the Pulitzer Prize.[1] As indicated by its title, “My Father Wrote Letters to the Cuban Government. Here Is Mine,” Ferrer’s essay takes the form of a letter addressed to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. While Ferrer’s short article might seem like a rather minor item in the deluge of recent commentary on Cuba, and so barely worthy of our attention, it is in fact an unusually revealing and instructive piece, offering an excellent example of a simple truth: even many apparently moderate, intellectually sophisticated observers accept the basic premises of U.S. government policy toward Cuba.
The first of these premises is that the Cuban government is to blame for Cuba’s socioeconomic woes. Forget the absolutely devastating U.S. embargo; forget the countless—and very well-documented—acts of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba carried out or condoned by the United States since 1959; forget successive U.S. governments’ unrelenting efforts to destabilize Cuba and interfere in the country’s internal affairs; forget the current oil blockade and other measures with which the U.S. aims to induce social unrest in Cuba. For Ferrer, the Cuban government is the problem. But Ferrer not only accepts the premises of U.S. policy, but actually accepts the policy itself, although she does so, as we shall see, obliquely, in a roundabout manner. And this is not surprising, for Ferrer plainly believes, as we shall also see, that this policy in no way undermines or constrains Cuban sovereignty.
Ferrer begins her essay by referring to the letters that her father wrote to Fidel Castro from Miami Beach. In all of her father’s letters to Fidel, Ferrer informs us, the “basic message was clear: It was time for change.” This is the message of Ferrer’s letter, too. But what kind of change?
As the United States has pursued an absolutely inhumane policy toward Cuba for decades—the most important component of which has been condemned by the UN General Assembly year after year since the early 1990s—and Ferrer is writing for a primarily U.S. readership, one naturally assumes that what she means is a change in U.S. policy. It is also natural to make this assumption because Ferrer’s first duty, as a U.S. citizen, is to demand changes in U.S. government policies that are cruel and unjust. After all, the U.S. government represents her; if it is pursuing a policy that Ferrer not only rejects but also causes immense, needless suffering, her first obligation is to condemn those policies.
Alas, Ferrer has a very different kind of change in mind. According to Ferrer, it is Cuba that must change. To support her case, Ferrer mentions a number of problems. These include, in addition to the widespread blackouts, “hospitals [that] have trouble powering incubators or dialysis machines or even the old fans in their perpetually losing battle against the heat,” and the fact that “most basic medicines are not available.” No one would deny that Cuba faces the problems cited by Ferrer and that these problems are very serious indeed. Nor would anyone deny that they cannot be adequately addressed until we understand their causes. What, then, is the main cause of the scarcity, shortages and economic failures that have led to these problems?
For Ferrer, the answer is plainly not the embargo, to whose impact and effects she dedicates just one, condescending paragraph, which begins, “Yes, I know. The embargo. It makes everything so much harder.” It’s as simple as that: being subjected to U.S. efforts at systematic economic strangulation for more than six decades just makes things “so much harder.” As if we—or the President of Cuba, who is after all, Ferrer’s addressee—hadn’t gotten her point, Ferrer immediately reminds us, in the very next paragraph, “there are so many things the embargo cannot explain.” It doesn’t explain, Ferrer tells us, the government’s failure to implement economic reforms promised fifteen years ago, or “the disastrous currency restructuring that sent inflation into triple digits in January 2021,” let alone the cases of Cubans who, she alleges, “languish in prison for their art, their voice, their example.” Continuing with her broadside, she writes, “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?”
By this point in the letter, one is naturally wondering, “But, what, exactly, is Ferrer’s position on the United States’ treatment of Cuba?” Immediately after the lines that I just cited, Ferrer offers, in a sense, her answer to this question, when she tells Cuba’s president, “Do not take this letter as a defense of U.S. policy toward Cuba.” This is surely the strangest statement in the entire essay—assuming that it is not meant as a joke—since what Ferrer’s piece offers is, to all intents and purposes, just that: a defense of U.S. policy toward Cuba. For if a writer neglects to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba and minimizes its responsibility for Cuba’s extremely serious socioeconomic problems; places the burden for solving these problems entirely on Cuba; refuses to make any demands of the country that has spent so many years, and endless resources, trying to strongarm Cuba—a very small, underdeveloped country—into submission and obedience; and ignores the fact that, in its dealings with Cuba, the United States government consistently violates the Charter of the United Nations, the Charter of the Organization of American States, and the Vienna Convention, then that writer’s position is, in practical terms, indistinguishable from that of people who defend American policy toward Cuba.
That Ferrer offers an implicit endorsement of U.S. policy toward Cuba becomes even more obvious if we bear in mind what her letter says about sovereignty. “You and your government have cheapened the word [sovereignty],” Ferrer tells Díaz-Canel. She adds: “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.”
Incredibly enough, Ferrer seems to believe that the American government’s treatment of Cuba in no way compromises Cuban sovereignty. But to sanction countries and firms that wish to trade with Cuba; to use diplomatic personnel to routinely interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs; to maintain a military base on Cuban territory against the wishes of the Cuban people; to finance innumerable organizations and media outlets whose only purpose is the destabilization of Cuban society; and to prevent any fuel from reaching the island—each of these things limits Cuba’s ability to exercise its national sovereignty. A writer could ignore such factors only if she or he had, to quote Ferrer, “cheapened the word.” And this is precisely what Ferrer has done—cheapened the meaning of sovereignty, which she seems to think perfectly compatible, in regard to Cuba, with subjugation to the United States. Indeed, she may well think that this is what the concept of “sovereignty” means in this particular case. (Should we be surprised, then, that her article never mentions Guantánamo?) But, of course, if this is how Ferrer understands sovereignty, there is hardly any reason for her to reject American policy toward Revolutionary Cuba.
As for the old counterrevolutionary accusation that the Cuban Revolution merely replaced one “dependence” with another, does Ferrer really not see any difference between the United States’ near complete domination of the Cuban economy before 1959 and the aid received, following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, from the Soviet Union and Venezuela? Does Ferrer really believe that the influence of Soviet or Venezuelan officials in Cuba has ever been even remotely comparable to the influence—and power—of American officials prior to the Cuban Revolution? That was, after all, a period in which “the American Ambassador was the second-most important man in Cuba…[and] sometimes even more important than the President,” as Earl E. T. Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, told a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1960. (And what, exactly, were Cuba’s options, once the United States became determined to isolate Cuba both politically and economically from as much of the world as possible?) In any case, Ferrer also implicitly invokes this idea of “dependence” to explain Cuba’s current state: “Without an external patron,” she writes, “Cuba is…imploding.” Notice that Ferrer’s reasoning here dovetails with the U.S. government interpretation of events: the issue is not the American threats and sanctions that prevent Cuba from freely engaging in trade relations with other countries, but the loss of “an external patron.”
Ferrer concludes her essay by declaring that “it is time at the very least for a true national dialogue.” She means, of course, a dialogue under duress, a dialogue within a framework of threats and coercion, a dialogue in which Cubans living on the island have a gun held to their head. (Such a “dialogue” would be, incidentally, a very far cry from the quite promising dialogue that began to materialize during the Carter administration.)
Sadly, the more vindictive, ruthless and criminal U.S. aggression against Cuba, the more some people actually tend to blame the victim of this aggression—that is, to blame Cuba—for the problems plaguing Cuban society. Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that some ordinary people in the United States, who have been subjected to decades of anti-Revolutionary propaganda and indoctrination, end up blaming the victim of such aggression. But that a historian of Ferrer’s stature should be encouraging this exercise in victim-blaming, and that she should be doing so at the very moment in which the United States is sparing no effort to engineer a humanitarian emergency in Cuba, is astonishing, and a very disturbing sign of the times.
Note
[1]My source for Ferrer’s essay is the online version, dated May 6, 2026. The article was apparently also published in a print edition four days later. For data and references regarding the different aspects of U.S. policy toward Cuba that I discuss here, see the Introduction and Chapter 3 of my book The Political Thought of Fidel Castro. The source for the quotation from Earl E. T. Smith can be found in the endnotes for Chapter 2 of the book.