RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books\"As America, América pursues its course across the centuries with verve, superb pacing, and impressive delicacy of touch, it sometimes pauses to consider varying notions of \'progress.\' In the United States, progress came to be equated with \'territorial enlargement\'—the constant, violent conquest of new lands and the inexorable outward movement of settlement upon them. Hegel, in far-off Germany, justified it as \'the march of God in the world.\' Grandin has the endearing quirk of placing some of the most telling context for his narrative in footnotes. One such note gives a quick account of works by several historians that show how the US frontier served as inspiration for the Nazis in their quest for \'Lebensraum,\' or \'living space\' ... builds a strong case in support of Martí’s idea of Latin America as a potential counterbalance to unbridled US military and economic might ... Across Latin America today, Grandin tallies, more than 480 million people, out of a total population of 625 million, currently \'live under some kind of social-democratic government.\' While our leaders decry the region, eye it for potential future conquest, eliminate the Spanish language from government websites, and ship whomever they like off to Salvadoran gulags without due process or hope of return, the rest of us can look at that clear majority and hope one day to be part of it.\
Ada Ferrer
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksDeftly and without fanfare, Ferrer upends the 1898 narrative of the United States as Cuba’s savior with an episode from 1781, just prior to the Battle of Yorktown ... There is abundant horror on view in these pages, but all are composed with compassionate eloquence. Ferrer’s history of Cuba is the history of her own life, writ large ... Ferrer’s book, which may be the first general overview of Cuban history written by a woman, spends no time on denunciation—no small feat in a historical context where denunciation has been the order of the day for many decades. Instead, it is primarily concerned with demonstrating just how deeply and intricately enmeshed the histories of Cuba and the United States are. In overflowing, revelatory, and loving detail, Ferrer charts the living, human connections between two nations whose long symbiosis...continually survives each one’s efforts to cut off ties to the other.
