• NPR , Thursday, September 25, 2008 10:16 AM

I've seen several positive reviews of Tom Gjelten's Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (Viking, $27.95) over the past few weeks. The most interesting, from a marketing perspective, is Harry Hurt III's in last Sunday's New York Times business section . But since Gjelten is a correspondent for NPR News, I figured his own would take care of him and finally got around to searching the NPR Web site. Indeed, a "Morning Edition" interview by Renee Montagne on Sept. 8 is amplified by a short except from the book, a gallery of old ads and interview outtakes. Montagne's segment begins with the opening from "Party With Bacardi," a popular radio show in pre-Castro Cuba that will have you cha-chaing in your corner office. Then Gjelten talks about how founder Don Fecundo Bacardi turned rum, which was a harsh-tasting "rough man's drink," into a much lighter elixir that has mass appeal that can be mixed with other beverages.

There's also a gallery of Bacardi's pro-Cuban advertisements on the NPR site. One of them reminds me of a transit poster I saw for a different brand of rum the other day that features, quite starkly, a bottle and a shapely bottom in a bikini. "Nothing subtle about that," I mused to myself. Well, there's nothing subtle either about a circa-WW II poster featuring a beaming lass parachuting with multiple bottles of Bacardi rum and Bacardi cerveza in either arm, her blouse buttons straining at the effort. But perhaps a little bit more fantasy, if not thought, went into the Bacardi effort .

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