“Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause”, by Tom Gjelten

480 pages, Viking Press, ISBN-13: 978-0670019786

There has recently been a renewed interest in prerevolutionary Cuba, steming from the fact that Cuba today is so unromantic, so poor and stricken with prostitution, that people want to understand the prehistory of Castro, for there really is a lot to learn about this island nation that the sumbitch dominated for so long before he ever came to power. This has given us new studies of the Mafia in Cuba and recent books on the Americans who fought in the revolution, while Tom Gjelten's Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause examines a previously unstudied subject, the history of the Bacardi rum family and the nation of Cuba. Most would have assumed the family, being some of the wealthier citizens of the island, would not have been Castro supporters or progressive in the least bit. But the truth is quite different.

Looking for insights on Cuban history, culture, politics and, yes, Castro, Gjelten has written a good historical exposition of a country that has gone through more turmoil and experiments in government than perhaps any other in the Western hemisphere. Looking as well for an informative and exciting narrative about a family owned company, Gjelten has simultaneously written a moving story of a strong-willed entrepreneurial family blessed with three masterful CEOs in succession who figured out how to succeed worldwide despite being headquartered in a relatively unsophisticated financial backwater. Put these two stories together and the result is the proverbial whole being greater than the sum of its parts: an excellent journey juxtaposing financial acumen combined with patriotism, on the one hand, against a variety of dismaying governmental experiments, on the other, including Spanish colonialism, years of revolution, US intervention, embryonic democracy, dictatorship and, finally, a destructive Marxist state economic system.

This was obviously a labor of love for Gjelten, a first rate NPR reporter and analyst, as reflected in the source documentation provided unobtrusively at the end of the book, the very thorough and useful Bacardi family tree and the extensive photograph collection that brings even more life to the already well-drawn characters. A much-needed insight into how a company and a nation can be betrayed and destroyed, yet (perhaps) still arise anew.