Bacardi And The Long Fight For Cuba

In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the violent division of the Cuban nation.

In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the violent division of the Cuban nation.

A history of Cuba as reflected by the dynasty of the famous Barcardi rum family traces five generations during which they served as an example of business and civic leadership while alternately fighting for national freedom and honoring their country as exiles. 30,000 first printing.

Second volume of Deutscher prize-winning trilogy on the future of IR, tracing the defining characteristics of 'foreign encounters' over time.

Richly illustrated with vintage, powerfully graphic, and often glamorous imagery, Building Bacardi tells the story of the iconic brand’s love affair with high design. Anyway you drink it … Bacardi rum is the mixable one. Bacardi is best known for its rum and trademark bat logo, yet the famed spirits company has also been a force in the development of avant-garde art and architecture. True to the company slogan, Bacardi has asserted its corporate identity through buildings designed by a potent mix of modern architects with varying, sometimes radically different approaches to architecture. Corporate headquarters, distilleries, bottling plants, and executives’ private homes have shaped and reflected Bacardi’s position as a regional upstart, a national icon, and a global corporation with outposts in such places as Bermuda, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. Building Bacardi is the first book to explore the twentieth-century architectural legacy of the company.

A thorough examination of the history of the controversial island country looks at little-known aspects of its past, from its pre-Columbian origins to the fate of its native peoples, complete with up-to-date information on Cuba's place in a post-Soviet world.

“An incisive look at immigration, assimilation, and national identity” (Kirkus Reviews) and the landmark immigration law that transformed the face of the nation more than fifty years ago, as told through the stories of immigrant families in one suburban county in Virginia. In the years since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the foreign-born population of the United States has tripled. Americans today are vastly more diverse than ever. They look different, speak different languages, practice different religions, eat different foods, and enjoy different cultures. In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was ninety percent white, ten percent African-American, with a little more than one hundred families who were “other.” Currently the Anglo white population is less than fifty percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. “In A Nation of Nations, National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten brings these changes to life” (The Wall Street Journal), following a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually “Americanize.” Hailing from Korea, Bolivia, and Libya, the families included illustrate common immigrant themes: friction between minorities, economic competition and entrepreneurship, and racial and cultural stereotyping. It’s been half a century since the Immigration and Nationality Act changed the landscape of America, and no book has assessed the impact or importance of this law as A Nation of Nations. With these “powerful human stories…Gjelten has produced a compelling and informative account of the impact of the 1965 reforms, one that is indispensable reading at a time when anti-immigrant demagoguery has again found its way onto the main stage of political discourse” (The Washington Post).

The histories of sugarcane and its ethereal descendant-authentic Cuban rum-are closely associated with the legends of the Cuban nation, with its countryside, its culture, its music and its spirit. In this book you will discover the true roots of Cuban rum: from its relationships with people from explorer Christopher Columbus to author Ernest Hemingway; with places from the aging cellars at the distilleries to the legendary bars of Havana; and with its multi-cultural influences that they transformed into a distinctive Cuban identity; and with the embodiment of that persona in art, in literature, in music, in spirituality and in life itself. This is a tale of passion and imagery, in which kings and conquistadors, pirates and planters, master rum blenders and bartenders, international movie stars and industrial magnates, revolutionaries and romanticists each play a significant role.