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My Father Wrote Letters to the Cuban Government, Here Is Mine

HAVANA TIMES – The following is a letter from Cuban-American professor Ada Ferrer to Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel that was published in the New York Times on May 6, 2026.

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.

By Ada Ferrer* (The New York Times)

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 it was good on the nineteenth 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.”

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........

© Havana Times