The Cuba We Lost preserves firsthand memories from people who experienced the upheaval following the 1959 Cuban Revolution as children, teenagers, and young adults. When did you realize your generation’s memories were disappearing along with the people who carried them?

I was actually sitting in a circle of historians who were trying to document the voices of the last survivors of the Holocaust and the challenges of their advanced ages in many cases, and my brain flipped to my own Cuban heritage and the fact that the generation that brought us out of Cuba, our parents and grandparents, had mostly passed on and that we, who were children at the time, are the last living witnesses to that event and also had firsthand knowledge from our parents.

Many contributors experienced these events as children or teenagers. What does a child’s perspective reveal that a conventional historical account might miss?

Although I did not know this when I started writing, the voices that were coming out of the adults that were sitting across from me ,were actually the voices of the kids. They took my soldier, they took my doll, they were mean to me, etc., and then the torrential flood of grief that flowed was unexpected and exhausting. The words were not measured, as the words of an adult usually are.

How can oral histories contribute to our understanding of major historical events in ways official records cannot?

Oral histories, I believe, add a human dimension to any event. The official written history cannot tell us how it actually felt while the event was happening. These testimonies reveal the fear, the anxiety, and the quiet triumphs that are the underlying thread connecting the written histories. Written history is about facts and oral histories are about feelings.

You describe the project as becoming “a chronicle of quiet voices preserving personal and family histories.” When did you realize that was what the book had become?

I realized deep into the interviews that we had all kept quiet for over 50 years, and now the stories gushed out amid tears. I was not expecting that. Those being interviewed sobbed, and I sobbed. I realized that we were all collectively recounting the most traumatic event in our lives.

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