When Americans today talk about Cuba, they often bring up Fidel Castro or the state of the island's current government. But as Ferrer writes in her Pulitzer Prize-winning history, the United States had its hands in Cuba long before the country's revolution rebuffed their influence. Her narrative tells the story of a country that has spent the past several decades fighting for the right to self-determination among changing political tides; this is also the story of the United States, where the question of Cuba may really be about the way the US perceives its own history.