Why Study the Past? A historian reflects

Why did I become a historian? Over the years my answers to this question have changed. I used to elaborate on the merits of history as a discipline that helps us understand where societies come from, where they are headed—the past as the ultimate teacher. These days, however, I give a simpler, more intimate answer.

I was born into a family of storytellers that for generations has endured and struggled to fathom the fascinating yet often cruel forces of history. My vocation began to develop at an early age as I listened to the endless tales told by my paternal grandmother, María de la Concepción Lindín—a.k.a. Concha—who had been born in 1892. I was spellbound by her accounts of the long, humid winters she spent growing up as a peasant in Xemil, a Galician village. At fifteen she crossed the Atlantic Ocean by herself and settled in Buenos Aires, where she became a maid. Peasant life offered her little. She was determined to escape its suffocating grip. She had promised her father she would return, and she did, even though the journey must have cost her at least a year’s wages. But she stayed only a short time, for the Americas had captured her heart. What she had not taken into account was that, with World War I under way, German submarines were sinking ships en route to the Southern Hemisphere.

So a return to Argentina was out of the question. Destiny took Concha instead to Cuba, to which it was safer to travel, as tens of thousands of Spaniards were doing. Her arrival in Havana was dramatic: the tender boat that was carrying her flipped over, sinking her luggage in the bay, including a few pieces of smuggled chorizos.

She soon met and married my grandfather, Celestino Martínez, a handsome asturiano who had also fled the confining world of northern Spain in search of a better life in the New World.

The other side of my family are criollos cubanos: my maternal grandfather, Luis Fernández, is from the tobacco-growing province of Pinar del Rio; my grandmother, Lourdes Cisneros, is from Camagüey. Because I left Cuba and my maternal grandparents at the age of two, this side of the family remained remote and unfamiliar to me—a nagging mystery. I did know, however, that from this side of my family politics run deep in my blood. A great-grandfather, another Luis Fernández, was the Liberal Party boss in the deceitfully named town of Los Palacios. I’m told I have a loose connection—someday I’ll find out how loose—to Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, a hero of the War of Independence and, for a short time, president of the república en armas.

Understanding the timing and context of every process and event is essential to historians. Like everyone else, my father had no say in when and where he was born, but these facts shaped his life. He came into the world in Havana, in the spring of 1933, as Gerardo Machado’s dictatorial government was about to collapse, against the backdrop of the Great Depression and a revolution that brought with it another dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

These were difficult times in the household. My grandfather lost his policeman’s job and was imprisoned for a while in the midst of the political turmoil after having been falsely accused of taking part in a conspiracy against Machado. He was lucky to escape alive, after convincing an angry mob that he was not the asturiano they were after.

I, too, was born in the midst of revolutionary upheaval, in 1960, as the decades-long tropical nightmare was beginning. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, our family was evacuated from our building in Miramar, a Havana suburb. Only two blocks away from the Columbia airfield, it was the tallest building on its block. Olive-clad, bearded soldiers set up two anti-air units on the roof. On our way out, soldiers stopped my father, who was [End Page...