In A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South during Prohibition, Lisa Lindquist Dorr constructs an astonishingly well-documented and thorough account of the water-borne traffic in illegal liquor from Havana, Cuba, to numerous sites on the southern Gulf and Atlantic coasts during national prohibition in the 1920s. Cuba joined Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Bahamas as the chief departure points for smugglers to transport legally-manufactured liquors from overseas to the underground American market. Smuggled liquor, Dorr asserts, was the largest source of illegal alcohol consumed by Americans during national prohibition. Despite a 1926 treaty with Cuba, expanded powers allowing the Coast Guard to track and seize vessels outside the usual territorial limits of the United States, and the undercover efforts of a colorful group of civilian agents working for the Intelligence Division of the Coast Guard, the flow of illegal liquor to the southern states was never closed off. Indeed, enterprising smugglers began to include narcotics and illegal immigrants (barred by 1921 and 1924 immigration quotas) along with liquor in their cargoes bound for southern shores. Prohibition, smuggling, and the failed effort to deter it, Dorr argues, helped modernize the South and connect it culturally with the rest of the nation, formed a bond between Cuba and pleasure-seeking Americans, and extended American police power more aggressively into the Caribbean.

Dorr draws on a remarkable array of underused records to document the business of smuggling, the failures of federal enforcement, and the more cosmopolitan culture that grew up in the South around illicit liquor and its international supply network. She is most original in her use of United States Coast Guard and Coast Guard Intelligence correspondence and reports, but she also consults a wide array of sources ranging from the papers of other United States government agencies and departments, the manuscript reports of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, and court and prison records, to postcards from tourists vacationing in Florida and Havana. Smuggling from Cuba, an enforcement officer reported, was “carried on by a large number of small units, for the most part acting independently” (7). Wholesale liquor dealers in Havana purchased legal shipments of liquor from international sources. The wholesalers, some of whom were Americans, sold the liquor to captains of rum-running vessels who then purportedly traveled to legal ports of entry, such as the Dominican Republic. Wholesalers furnished the smugglers with false papers indicating that the cargo had been unloaded in legal ports, when, in fact, the smugglers carried the liquor to the United States and distributed the cargo onto contact boats, which delivered the spirits to secluded landing spots. Once ashore, liquor was shipped by train to northern destinations, distributed for sale at gas stations, soft drink stands, and hotels along the new highways of the South; or sold from private homes and boarding houses, often by women, in southern towns and cities. The illegal trade was operated as a business, but it was enabled by corruption. Rather than producing organized criminal syndicates, southern smuggling joined together bribed Cuban customs officials; profit-seeking mariners; corruptible dry agents and public officials; dishonest businesspeople (a bank president was a central figure in Mobile's smuggling ring); and a collection of train porters, hotel bellmen, barbers, widows, and landladies, many of them African American, who supplemented inadequate incomes by bootlegging.

United States officials struggled to enforce prohibition on the southern coastline. The Coast Guard lacked the ships to patrol the vast Gulf Coast and officers and crews sometimes seemed indifferent to their expanded law enforcement duties. Beleaguered federal authorities adopted inventive tactics to pursue an ultimately unwinnable campaign. Coast Guard ships shadowed suspected smuggling vessels, preventing them from transferring liquor to small boats that were adept at evading patrols, and forcing some smugglers to return to Havana with full cargoes. Civilians in Havana working for Coast Guard Intelligence infiltrated smuggling crews and socialized with Cuban officials and in that way uncovered the traffic in false landing documents. For the most part, however, the United States combated smuggling by projecting its power into the Caribbean and pressuring Cuba to carry out American policing. This set a dangerous precedent and ultimately failed to stop smuggling. The 1926 treaty negotiated by the United States compelled Cuba to crack down on Cuban-flagged smugglers from Havana. Adept entrepreneurs moved to other ports and sailed under alternative flags. Undercover activities were compromised by bureaucratic tangles in Washington. American thirst for illegal alcohol and the positive impact of the smuggling economy on Cuba combined to defeat dry initiatives.

Dorr furthermore attempts to revise the image of an abstemious, backward South. She points out that state prohibition laws in the South that preceded national Prohibition usually contained personal use exemptions that satisfied the alcoholic appetite of southern drinkers. The illegal traffic in smuggled liquor therefore supplied a demand that was not new. Yet the transportation system that linked the South with the rest of the nation also created resorts in New Orleans; Tampa; Miami; and, by ferry, Havana itself, that extended a modern, entertainment-based drinking culture into southern society. This section of the book is more speculative than the careful dissection of smuggling and enforcement activities. Southern dry voices appear in the text, but they are muted. Still, Dorr presents a forceful and interesting argument on modernizing aspects of southern drinking culture during Prohibition.

A few oversights or exaggerations may be mentioned. Dorr briefly notes that most liquor smuggled into the South was diluted, colored, flavored, and repackaged to create a greater supply, but much of her presentation conveys the impression that southern drinkers were enjoying quality liquor. Along with the raw-tasting white mule and needled beer served to American consumers, altered and even adulterated liquor was the most common product available in prohibition America. Nor does Dorr investigate the retail price of liquor in southern markets. But that is a small piece of Dorr's well-wrought story. Her book is a major contribution to Prohibition and Southern history.