America looms large in a new history of Cuba

Cuba: An American History. By Ada Ferrer. Scribner; 576 pages; $32

IN 1853 WILLIAM KING was sworn in as vice-president of the United States on a sugar plantation in Matanzas, near Cuba’s northern coast. King, who had hoped that spending his afternoons amid the fumes of boiling sugar would cure the tuberculosis from which he was dying, asked Congress for permission to take office as deputy to President Franklin Pierce on foreign soil. He lasted only 45 days in the job, returning to his own plantation in Alabama just before he died.

His is one of many stories told by Ada Ferrer in “Cuba: An American History” to show how intertwined the two countries have been. King’s presence on the island was telling. The slave-owning deputy of a northern president who sought to placate the restive American South, he took the oath in a place where slaves harvested the crop that made Cuba one of Spain’s most profitable colonies. King and Pierce had campaigned to make Cuba an American possession; their supporters carried banners reading “Pierce and Cuba”. The off-site inauguration “exemplified the power of a system that linked planters, slave-traders and investors from New York to Charleston to the African coast to Havana, Matanzas and the green cane fields of the island’s interior”, Ms Ferrer writes...