Andrés Pertierra
Position title: TA: History 260 with Professor Marcella Hayes
Email: pertierra@wisc.edu
Address:
Advisor: Patrick Iber

Biography
I am a historian of Latin America & the Caribbean specializing in the history of Cuba and its relations with the wider world. In the past, my research has focused on early 19th century Cuba-US relations, specifically failures in American intelligence gathering in Havana in the early 19th century. More recently, my MA thesis explored how the Cuban government post-1959 cultivated leftist intellectuals and artists as part of its soft power projection during the early Cold War. Now, I am exploring Cuban-Spanish relations during the late Cold War and early post-Cold War world as a lens through which to understand a key part of the story of regime survival on the island despite losing 3/4ths of its foreign trade almost overnight, due to the collapse of the USSR and COMECON. During my time at UW-Madison I have benefited greatly from its support and resources, which not only enabled me to spend 8 months in Cuba conducting original research for my dissertation but also to learn additional languages relevant to my studies, such as Portuguese and Russian. Given the limits of archival access in Cuba, the use of the archives of former allies of Havana whose governments have since crumbled are an increasingly essential tool for piecing together thorny and delicate topics within post-1959 Cuban history. I see my future research taking me further into foreign archives as a way to triangulate and fill gaps in the declassified record in Cuba, putting my language abilities to full use.
While a historian’s historian, by training and vocation, my work increasingly straddles the lines between speaking to historical scholarship and political science research. In particular, I engage with regime durability debates in contemporary political science which attempt to parse out how non-liberal democratic regimes maintain power. I see my work engaging in particular with the likes of Martin Dimitrov, Steven Levitsky & Lucan Way, and Beatriz Magaloni.
I have a somewhat unique background which has contributed greatly to my expertise in Cuban Studies. My professional middle class family fled Cuba in the early 1960s and remade their lives in the United States, after which they reconnected with the island and began visiting it regularly during the late Cold War and increasingly since 1991. I pursued and completed my undergraduate studies in History at the University of Havana, Cuba, where I was – as far as I know – only the second American since 1959 to do the entirety of my BA in Cuba (excepting medical students at the ELAM). My half a decade living in Cuba as a student and my repeated travel there since then have been invaluable in providing me the experience necessary for in-depth analysis of a notoriously ‘closed’ society where truth, half-truth, and fiction are often hard to discern, not just for outsiders but for Cubans themselves.
My expertise and analysis has been cited in publications such as Reuters, the Financial Times, and other publications, and I have appeared on the BBC and DW as an invited expert to offer analysis of contemporary Cuba. I have been published in The Nation, Dissent, and Letras Libres magazines, among others, and regularly review new monographs on Cuba for both academic journals and magazines read by the general public.
Education
B.A., University of Havana
Field
- Latin American & Caribbean History
Working Dissertation Title
- “The Iron Under the Feet of Clay: Spanish-Cuban Relations and Cuban Regime Survival, 1975-2008”
Selected Publications
- Pertierra , A. S. (2023). Review of Guerra, Lillian: Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba: 1961-1981. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023, 480 pp. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 21(1), 286–290.
- Pertierra, Andrés S. Review titled “Cuban Views of, and from, the East”, upcoming Cuban Studies Journal, volume 55, tentatively to be published in 2025.
- Pertierra, Andrés. “Cuba Without the Castros” | Dissent Magazine (feature piece, Winter 2019 issue) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cuba-without-the-castros
- “En Cuba, La Próxima Protesta Puede Ser Definitiva” | Letras Libres (August 11, 2022) https://letraslibres.com/politica/andres-pertierra-proxima-protesta-cuba/
- “The Meaning of the Protests in Cuba” | Dissent Magazine (August 13, 2021) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-meaning-of-the-protests-in-cuba
Professional Affiliations
- Member of LASA, SECOLAS, and Southern Historical Association
Courses Taught as TA
- History 130 – An Introduction to World History, Fall 2020 (Instructor H. William Warner)
- History/LACIS 260 – Latin America: An Introduction (Associate Professor Patrick Iber)