Jonathan M. Hansen is a senior lecturer in Social Studies and a faculty associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: You’ve researched the nation state and how citizens reconcile national, international, and subnational loyalties. Why did you choose to study these topics through history as opposed to literature, political science, or philosophy?

JMH: I was drawn to questions of American national identity.

The late 19th century, which was my field of expertise, was a period of real demographic upheaval.

The United States was going very self-consciously into the world. People were asking what it meant to be American, and who could be a good American at that time. I wrote my first book about a group of American intellectuals and social critics: Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, William James, and others who were arguing about the meaning of American national identity and arguing for an inclusive version of American national identity, and making arguments that patriotism wasn’t about defending your country right or wrong, but was actually about asking, forcing, compelling the country to live up to its ideals.

They were arguing for a kind of left patriotism that sounded unusual to me. I grew up post Vietnam War when leftists, the left progressives, historically ceded patriotism to the right.

The rhetoric of patriotism is very powerful, and to simply cede it to the right doesn’t make any sense at all.

FM: It’s interesting, in this U.S. context, the hesitancy of the left to use this model of patriotism. I’m curious, why do you think the idea of the nation state is used more by politicians of the left in Latin America? I’m thinking of Lula and sort of this idea “Brazil is for Brazilians.” What is it about the U.S. American nation state that’s perhaps different?

JMH: I’ll just re-emphasize that patriotism in America has typically been used, at least in our time, but even in the time of my intellectual and social critics, as an argument to shut down conversation. I think it’s different in socialist countries — countries that, they’re not all socialists and only socialists, but right now there’s a big swing against them — I think those countries are more comfortable to argue with a form of nationalism.

I can tell you about Cuba, which I know.

It was just really clear to me that Castro was arguing in a very familiar rhetoric and a very familiar language of revolution and independence. He wanted a free and independent and autonomous Cuba. That’s a pretty liberal, not necessarily communist or socialist, aspiration.

The young Castro, up through the triumph of the revolution, was not a communist. Che was a communist, his brother Raúl was a communist, he was surrounded by communists. He worked with communists, but he was a liberal nationalist fighting for a free and independent Cuba of U.S. control.

Fidel was asking for reform, just like my early 20th century so-called left patriots. He was arguing for patriotism.

Lula does the same thing, and many different South American leaders have done that at different times.

FM: You mentioned that there was this debate at the end of the 19th century, and in some regards it does exist today — does the U.S. receive the world? How does it receive the world? How do we balance these international commitments versus national ones? And the World Cup was hosted this summer in the United States. What do you make of the many moments of international solidarity and nationalist rivalries during the tournament?

JMH: I was skeptical going into the World Cup. I’m a soccer player. I coached at a high level. I played at a pretty high level. I love the World Cup. I was appalled by the price of tickets. I just think soccer is a people’s game, for God’s sake, let the people go to watch. I couldn’t believe it, and I was going to boycott it. I was getting all moralistic about it. And then, I tell you, I was so happily surprised by both the interaction between the people who came and the country itself. I think in all places, local, urban, red states, blue states. People hosted these teams, and they loved it.

FM: Who were you cheering for?

JMH: I’m always rooting for the United States, sort of, but I just don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t buy into this “we’re just on the cusp” nonsense. In the final I was rooting for Spain, I like Spain. I guess I was rooting for England.

FM: You’ve studied nationalism, imperialism, and revolution in Cuba. You’ve done this work on Castro. How is your perspective on Cuba, or sort of approaching Cuba as an American, shaped by your upbringing or formation in the United States?

JMH: When I was two months old, I went to Turkey for two years, when my dad was with the Peace Corps, and I grew up there. I’m oversharing, but I was conceived on an American Indian reservation at Four Corners in the Southwest. When we got back from Cuba, we went back to the Indian reservation. Then, I lived in Mound Bay, Mississippi, in an all-black town where my dad was opening a rural health clinic.

We did not exactly fit in.

Now having done two books on Cuba and now working on a book on Rwanda, I do feel comfortable in unfamiliar places.

I just want to make this absolutely clear: that doesn’t mean that I’m not aware that I am an outsider in these places and that I have a privilege of skin color. Skin color can be sometimes a privilege and sometimes a bane, and I’m aware of that. I, as an American, as wealthy, who comes from Harvard, have the luxury of coming into places, and people often want to talk to me, if they are not running from me as an interviewer. But, I try to be as humble as possible. I try to be as aware of what I don’t know as possible.

I also do anchor most of my work in the archives, and I got extraordinary access from the Cuban government after about three years, literally, of trust building. And so I base my interviews and my cultural observations on the scholarly work and the archives that I have access to — again, something that I feel privileged to get and don’t take for granted.

I think part of our obligation as Americans is to go and meet the world and try to meet them on their terms.

FM: You mentioned this three-year process of trust building with the Cuban government. Can you talk me through what this looked like? What were the struggles?

JMH: First of all, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed devil, as Malcolm X would put it, walks into the archives in Cuba and says, “Hi, can you help me?” This is in the middle of an embargo.

I had done a book on the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo that the Cubans deemed — as other people did in this country too — a very good book, a rigorous, fair-minded, professional book. So I had a calling card.

I got two extraordinary troves of evidence. One was from the Oficina de Asuntos Históricos of the country of Cuba, and that was amazing. These were the Castro archives. There hadn’t been an American doing work specifically on Castro there for 30 years. I also got —Fidel had a paramour, a lover through letters named Naty Revuelta, and she’s a famous person.

Naty, again, after time, a lot of trust — going to her veranda and sitting, talking, and convincing her that this is what I want to do. “I’m not here to embarrass you or embarrass him, but I’m really trying to bring this guy to life, to transcend the caricature that exists, and if you could help me, great.” Then one day I arrived in Havana and I got a note from her. She knew I was coming, and she said, “Come by.” And I was all very excited. I thought, “Super! She’s going to give me the letter.”

She said, “No, I can’t do it. I’m not ready.”

I said, “Let me tell you what I found at the archives.” I read her some letters that I had from the young Fidel to his father when he was on a trip to Bogota, and it was a lovely note. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “That’s so Fidel. That’s so Fidel.” She said, “Wait here.” She got up, went out, came back, dropped this stack of over 100 letters in my lap.

FM: In all of your visits to Cuba, what most surprised you? If there’s a specific event, moment, or interaction?

JMH: I’ll tell you what most surprised me, though. In retrospect, I’m not sure I should have been surprised. The Cuban people are very educated technologically, in terms of literature, sciences, and they’re just amazing. They live 90 miles off the coast of the United States, and they are not isolated, and they’re in the world, and they’re cosmopolitan. And they’re also fighters. Think of what they’ve done, what they’ve had to endure — this embargo and the sort of abuse of the U.S., but also you know, frankly, sometimes some abuses by their own government.

One morning, I was asked if I wanted to go to the rehearsal of the Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, their modern dance company. I said, “Hell yes.”

I go into the gym, and it’s an old gym, just tiny, tiny gym. Lining the edge are just a couple of chairs and some benches, and on one row about 10 bongos, beautiful big drums.

They start.

They never stop.

The men and the women were like the kind of athletes I’d never seen in my life.

It wasn’t a surprise, it was just a lesson. Cuba can participate. They can do it. They have game.

There’s a chip on their shoulder the size of Alaska.

There’s the talent, which all of us have or not have, but then there’s the resilience, and the knowledge that they did it themselves.

FM: We’ve been talking about the arts, and I know you have a collection of photograms from your time in Cuba. What do you believe photography allows you to capture that writing does not?

JMH: Havana, like many of these old cities around the world, is built layer upon layer upon layer. Unlike most cities in the world, Havana has suffered so much from penury because of the U.S. embargo, that those layers have been exposed in unusual ways because there’s so much decay.

What’s there for the photographer? Havana is what I call a sedimentary city.

That’s what I was trying to expose, which I think is beautiful, and also very poignant and, in some cases, heartbreaking.

FM: You’ve spoken about the value of speaking to people and listening to their experiences. If you had the opportunity to sit down and interview Castro himself, what is the one question you would ask?

JMH: Castro died in 2016. He got sick in 2006.

I had this breakthrough around 2013 or 14, and there was a question: Should I put some pressure on this guy?

People were saying, “Do you want to meet Fidel?”

The Fidel that I wrote about, the young Fidel, is very different from the guy that was just hanging out. I said, “Well, I’ve heard that he has some sisters who are living” — one of whom is named Juanita is in Florida, and one named Emma is in Mexico City — “I’d much rather, if you could help me, approach the sisters.” Instead of meeting Fidel, I met Emma Castro in Mexico City, and I spent two or three days with her. She said, “I’ve never talked to an outside historian before.”

So, I could have done it, but your question makes me answer: what Fidel?

FM: If you could talk to the young Castro?

JMH: The revolution triumphed really on New Year’s Eve ’58, so in ’59. In April he came to the United States. He was invited by some journalists, not by Eisenhower certainly or Nixon. In fact, Eisenhower fled, like went to play golf in Kansas or something, leaving him to like to talk to Nixon briefly. But he was mobbed at the train station in Washington. He was mobbed in New York City. He was mobbed in Boston. He came to Harvard. He was at Soldier’s Field.

It was just an unbelievable love scene. There’s pictures of him kneeling at the Lincoln Memorial by himself.

He gets a call from his brother Raúl. He said, “Fidel, what are you doing?” He said, “You know things are burning down here. We don’t have any money. Get your ass out of there!”

Raúl says, “And, by the way, there’s a meeting of the economic ministers of the Organization of American States down in Buenos Aires. Get your ass down there on the way home, and tell those guys to give some help.”

John F. Kennedy’s policy with Latin America, in 1961 — two years later — he announced something called the Alliance for Progress, which was an economic platform akin to the Marshall Plan for Latin America and for the Western Hemisphere to weave the economies of these countries together, and Kennedy was talked of as a visionary. Well, Fidel made such a plan to the OAS minister, economic ministers of the Western Hemisphere, down in Buenos Aires, and basically he got laughed at.

What I would ask him: “Were you blowing smoke, or did you mean it?” I think he would say, “I meant it.”

Mostly, I would just say hi.

FM: When discussing Castro’s legacies today, what do you perceive to be the largest misconception Castro’s rivals have?

JMH: He wasn’t originally communist. This thing wasn’t inevitable and could have gone another way.

He wasn’t in it for power. He was in it for a sovereign and independent Cuba — that was a kind of a liberal nationalist vision. His hero was José Martí — he was a liberal nationalist from the 19th century.

One of my great sources was an old friend of his from college who was in Miami.

After 30 years of not never seeing each other, never talking, and Fidel said to Max, “Why did you leave?” He said, “because I never wanted to grow up in a country that was communist.”

Fidel said, “me neither.”

“What would you have done if you were in my shoes?” Which is the question I want all my readers to ask all the time with all my books.

Would you have reached out to the Communist Party, as I said, as the platform to keep this thing alive when the U.S. came in to crush it, or would you have rolled over?

FM: There’s a new film being released on Castro this year. It will be one of many attempts to portray the figure on the big screen. What film adaptation of the revolution or of his life have you liked the most?

JMH: For the record, I was starting to do one.

It was going to be called “Castro in Love,” and it was going to depict Fidel Castro’s relationship with Natalia Revuelta, describing the complexity, the idealism, and the exhilaration of her being with him, what it was like to be in his presence, and what attracted him to her.

He was immensely charismatic.

It’s this real Castro that explodes the stereotypes.

FM: In what ways do you think Castro has influenced the model of leadership on the Latin American left that we continue to see today? Do you see allusions to his leadership style today? Do you think this charisma is at all being replicated today?

JMH: His example of standing up to the United States is what people see. It’s not exactly that they want to be Fidel in this way or that way. Cuba was rotting, like when Raúl took over from him in 2006, he said, “For God’s sake, we have to feed ourselves.”

It’s not exactly a stunning example of success, but the idealism there, and the devotion to a cause, and this sense that we’re going to stand up whatever comes, is definitely an inspiration around the world.

I’m spending most of my time when I’m not in class in Rwanda, and there you have people who know Castro.

This idealism is real. They have it too.

They’re also trying to rebuild after all sorts of cataclysms and traumas, whether it’s genocide or civil war, you name it, to get over colonialism.

Castro’s example in fomenting the revolution and standing up to the cause, I think, is very important.

FM: You’ve mentioned your work in Rwanda quite a bit. What made you shift gears to this area of study?

JMH: My wife is a physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, she runs the neonatal intensive care unit. Her name is Doctor Anne Hansen.

Thanks to her friend Paul Farmer — Partners in Health, the amazing international organization that does fantastic medicine originally against TB and AIDS all over the world. They had a project in Rwanda that was doing amazing work in AIDS and TB and things like that. But also they were setting up hospitals, founding new hospitals, and working with the Ministry of Health. There was literally no neonatal care.

PIH and Paul asked Anne to come and introduce a neonatal protocol. We took our young kids, ages nine, 12, and 15, to Rwanda for three months, and we lived in the rural areas.

I had no plan of doing anything, but I was just interested in what we saw. Here was a country — 15, 16 years post genocide — doing pretty well, expanding its social services, healthcare, things like that. I just said, “Wow, that’s interesting.” Being a Civil War historian, I was interested already in reconciliation. And then I just went back every year with her just for fun.

FM: Through your work, you have encouraged others to question their assumptions and biases when developing their ideas and engaging with each other. As Thanksgiving approaches, where many will sit down with their families and have small talk about U.S. foreign policy, what advice do you have for these conversations?

JMH: As a social scientist, I’m really interested in what happens around a Thanksgiving table, because I used to argue with my brother at the Thanksgiving table about the facts. But then, I’ve come to distinguish what happens around a Thanksgiving table as historical memory, and that I’m not sure you ever get any one specific truth about those things. My brother has an idea of the past. I have an idea of the past. Around the Thanksgiving table, I think his is as likely to succeed as mine, and I can’t refute it. And that’s not what the Thanksgiving table is about. I think memory functions writ large like that. Different cultures have their memories. Different people have that memory. And I see this in Cuba, and I see it in Rwanda, and I see it everywhere.

I think memories are always contested, and can be, and probably should be.

—Associate Magazine Editor Victoria D. Rengel can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @VictoriaRengel_.