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Title details for Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelten - Wait list

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

The Biography of a Cause

by Tom Gjelten
Robertson Dean
Audiobook
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0 of 1 copy available
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 8, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525532156
      • File size: 520408 KB
      • Duration: 18:04:10

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Gjelten mixes a smooth cocktail of histories--of the Bacardi family, their rum company, and Cuba--and Robertson Dean's delivery of that mix both pleases and holds the listener's interest. With his deep, soft voice and subdued tone, he comes across as nearly whispering, but his delivery is not soporific. His intelligent interpretation consistently brings out the author's meaning and represents his thoughts and opinions clearly. Dean's pacing is just right for the material; he tells it like a story. The variety of material--the switches from family members to corporate interests to national and international politics--helps to keep one's attention from flagging. Anyone interested in the Bacardi company or in Cuba should enjoy this audiobook and Dean's skillful performance. W.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 7, 2008
      The commonplace view of Cuba’s prerevolutionary business establishment as a corrupt kleptocracy is revised in this intriguing history of the Bacardi rum company and its involvement in Cuban politics. NPR correspondent Gjelten (Sarajevo Daily
      ) paints the 146-year-old distiller, once an icon of Cuban industry, as a model corporate citizen—efficient, innovative, socially responsible and union-tolerant. Its leaders were pillars of nationalist politics, he contends: company president Emilio Bacardi was a leader of Cuba’s rebellion against Spain, and in the 1950s CEO José Bosch helped fund Castro’s insurrection. (After Castro nationalized Bacardi’s Cuban holdings, Bosch started funding anti-Castro exiles.) Bacardi’s image as Cuban-nationalism-in-a-bottle becomes farcical when the company, now a multinational behemoth, fights an absurd court battle with Cuba’s state rum company over the “Havana Club” trademark. But Gjelten’s account of a liberal, progressive Cuban business clan complicates and enriches the conventional picture of a society torn between right and left dictatorships.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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