- 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
advertisement
advertisement
.
Read the whole story at NPR »