REFINED VICES

On one level, this book is the story of a great merchant family and its deeply intertwined relationship with a mysterious Caribbean island nation. But it is also a story of the still resonating conflicts between capitalism and communism, nationalism and imperialism, and freedom and tyranny.

Mr. Gjelten, a longtime correspondent for National Public Radio, won awards for his reporting about the war in Bosnia. He wrote “Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba” with extensive cooperation from members of the Bacardí family and executives of the Bacardi companies.

But despite an unabashed empathy for the Bacardís, he presents a fair, balanced, and yet extremely evocative portrait of the rum dynasty and its love-hate affairs with the Spanish Crown, Fidel Castro and the United States government.

Bottles of white Bacardi currently sold in the United States are labeled “Puerto Rican Rum,” and their contents are produced by the world’s largest distillery, in San Juan. But the Bacardí family is not from Puerto Rico. As Mr. Gjelten notes, “This family company for nearly a century was Cuban, cubanísima in fact — Cuban to the Nth degree.”