Louis A. Pérez Jr. provides an engaging and well-researched investigation into metaphors used by US politicians, journalists, and writers to depict Cuba. Through a wide-ranging study of visual sources, newspapers, government reports, and travel writing, Pérez argues persuasively that “the ideological function of metaphor” in US political and cultural discourse is that of promoting “the exercise of North American power as a matter of moral purpose” (4). Pérez demonstrates how a variety of metaphors have been created spanning the period from the early nineteenth century to the twentieth, including Cuba as a ripe apple, neighbour, woman, child, tropical paradise, and weapon. This study is particularly effective due to its interdisciplinary approach and the wide historical scope which it encompasses.

In a stimulating analysis of nineteenth-century attitudes towards Cuba, Pérez documents how the description of Cuba as a “ripe fruit” by US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1823 had considerable resonance, as it illustrated “the incontrovertible logic by which the laws of gravity would act to bring Cuba into the North American Union” (30). The concept of Cuba as ripe fruit was referred to by subsequent journalists and politicians throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Equally important in nineteenth-century political discourse was the metaphor of Cuba as a neighbour. The importance of maintaining the “well-being of the ‘neighborhood’” was used as a rhetorical justification by US politicians for intervening in Cuban affairs, a process which led up to the war with Spain over Cuba in 1898. Pérez notes how cartoons and newspaper reports of the war extended the metaphor of Cuba as neighbour to that of a woman. Cuba was depicted in the media as a “helpless woman,” at the mercy of both Spanish and even sometimes Cuban men, and thus she was portrayed as “beseeching the Americans for rescue and redemption” (71).

With the official inauguration of US control over Cuba in January 1899, Pérez observes the emergence of a new metaphor of “Cubans as child/children” (105). The idea that was promoted in the media that Cuba was unfit to govern itself and therefore that it needed the protection of the United States as guardian acted as a powerful mode of asserting a sense of colonial control. As Pérez convincingly argues, the metaphor of Cuba as child is also interrelated with the concepts of “civilization versus barbarism, the rational against the irrational, order and progress, on one hand, and chaos and backwardness, on the other” (107). Visual representations of Cuba being taught to ride a bicycle by the United States abounded in publications such as the Minneapolis Journal. The child–parent metaphor was closely tied in with an attitude on the part of US politicians that Cuba should be grateful to its master for its liberation.

In the early decades of the twentieth century Pérez notes the appearance of another metaphor of Cuba as “a site for fun, adventure, and abandon” (233). American advertisements for a range of products, including perfume, sunglasses, and cosmetics, used the name “Havana” as a brand which conjured up images of a sensual, tropical other. However, the advent of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959 and the subsequent fears which were generated regarding the Communist threat prompted the emergence of new metaphors. In the early 1960s the image of Cuba as a dagger pointing at the United States was cited in a number of political statements by the US government. The threat posed by Cuba at this time was also viewed by US politicians and journalists as a “disease threatening the body of the empire” (153). The danger posed by the prospect of a Communist infection required a “medical solution.” For example, in 1960 Kennedy spoke of the need “to quarantine the Cuban revolution” (254). The metaphors of Cuba which were created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still retain an influence on the rhetoric of contemporary political speeches and representations of Cuba in the media, therefore illustrating the ongoing relevance of the research undertaken by Pérez. This book is essential reading for Cuban experts, and it should be of interest to US and Latin American cultural historians.