“National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten writes an appealingly smooth and colorful history – thorough and open-minded.” –Peter Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle (read the entire SF Chronicle review)

“Exhaustively researched, succeeds in painting a vivid portrait of the company’s early, scrappy years and its prominent role in the fight against Spanish rule. Gjelten provides a fascinating look at how the company built itself into the multinational giant it has become.” –Randy Kennedy, New York Times Sunday Book Review (read the entire Sunday Book Review review)

“With thorough reporting and an eye for rich, often quirky detail, veteran National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten traces the story of the Bacardi family, whose product helped shape Cuba’s soul until Fidel Castro nationalized its company’s facilities in 1960.” –Will Weissert, The Chicago Tribune (read the entire review)

“Mr. Gjelten masterfully illuminates the biography of a cause personified by a proud family that pioneered a major business and shaped the recent past of Cuba, a neighbor whose still uncertain future will almost certainly affect America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.” –Harry Hurt III, New York Times Business Section (read the entire NY Times review)

“Absorbing history, at once a colorful family saga and a carefully researched corrective to caricatures of decadent pre-revolutionary Cuba.” –Linda Robinson, The Washington Post (read the entire review) (Listen to the Washington Post Book World podcast interview with Tom Gjelten)

“With its fabulous triumphs and poignant defeats, this stirring tale of rum, money, and revolutions has all the markings of a great epic movie.” –Richard Feinberg, Foreign Affairs (read the entire Foreign Affairs review)

“A thoughtful, thorough piece of reporting. Tom Gjelten subtly and skillfully details the saga of the Bacardi family. You may never look at a mojito or a daiquiri quite the same way.” –Peter M. Gianotti, Newsday (New York)

“A gripping saga that tells us just as much about human nature and the struggle between power and freedom as it does about Bacardi’s transformation from a fledgling business into the world’s top family-owned distiller.” –Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The Wall Street Journal (read the entire Wall Street Journal review)

“It’s hard to imagine that any (Cuban history) is as enjoyable as “Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba” by Tom Gjelten, a correspondent for National Public Radio. His book is as smooth and refreshing as a well-made daiquiri.” –Barry Gewen, New York Times (read the entire NY Times review)

Michael Deibert, The Miami Herald.

This is an engaging portrait of a family squabble and a corrupt country.

When a Catalan merchant named Facundo Bacardi purchased an underperforming rum distillery in Santiago de Cuba in 1862, he likely could little have imagined how vast his business venture would one day become, nor how intertwined its rise would be with the fate of a nation.

The story of Facundo and his descendants is the focus of the new book by National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten, who seeks in his narrative to view much of Cuba’s history through the microcosm of a single sprawling, occasionally squabbling Cuban family. He is largely successful in painting an engaging portrait of a vibrant though often tragic national trajectory.

Gjelten writes that what made the family-held company unique was its ”intertwining of nationalist and capitalist identities.” These dual strands never coalesce with greater passion than in Emilio Bacardi, Facundo’s son and the dominant figure in the first half of the book. Twice imprisoned by the Spanish and subsequently Santiago de Cuba’s first Cuban-born mayor and a national senator, Emilio represents perhaps the greatest flowering of these complementary identities. A fine portrait is likewise drawn of the corrupt playground Cuba became under presidents Ramón Grau San Martin and Fulgencio Batista.

Gjelten does not paint the island in stark primary colors of good and evil, instead portraying a Cuba of imperfect patriots, conflicted loyalties and sometimes disastrous rebellions. Fidel Castro’s ill-advised nationalization of businesses finally succeeds in driving the Bacardis out in a melancholy coda to a business identity that always seemed inextricably linked with the soil on which it was founded.

The book has some shortcomings, as Gjelten appears to have gotten a little too close to his subject and thereby lost some of the objectivity that is so important in such a definitive undertaking. The Bacardi family is almost always portrayed as selfless, while the company’s workers are often portrayed as difficult and opportunistic, though Gjelten does make a point of expounding upon the stark inequalities between Cuba’s rural poor and urban elite.

The family squabbles that mark the narrative once the Bacardis move to the United States prove nowhere near as engaging as the chronicle of revolution, politics and commerce that precedes it, though the company’s ability to get a pro-Bacardi amendment inserted into the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 1999 vividly illustrates how powerful corporations can bend legislation to suit their interests.

One is left with the sense that Cuba was a nation of missed opportunities. The original Bacardi credo of responsible civic engagement, one that the powerful in both Cuba and the United States could do well to remember, is perhaps best summed by lines that Emilio Bacardi penned following the start of the U.S. occupation of Cuba at the close of the 19th century: “The obligation of those in authority is to be at the service of those who suffer. It is not for those who suffer to be at the disposition of those who command.”

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.