TOM GJELTEN is a veteran correspondent for NPR News, specializing in national security and international affairs. His overseas reporting experience include stints in Mexico City as NPR's Latin America correspondent from 1986 to 1990 and in Berlin as Central Europe correspondent from 1990 to 1994. During those years, he covered the wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia, as well as the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

Preface
1. Santiago de Cuba
2. Entrepreneur
3. A Patriot Is Made
4. A Time of Transition
5. Cuba Libre
6. The Colossus Intervenes
7. A Public Servant in a Mis-Governed Land
8. The One that Made Cuba Famous
9. The Next Generation
10. The Empire Builder
11. Cuba Corrupted
12. Cha-Cha-Ch
13. A Brief Golden Age
14. Rising Up
15. Giving Fidel a Chance
16. The Year Cuba Changed
17. Exile
18. Counter-Revolution
19. Socialist Rum
20. Family Business
21. Havana Club
22. Rum Politics
23. Who Gets Cuba

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. (Sept.)