Description
Cuba, an island 750 miles long, with a population of about 11 million, lies lower than 100 miles off the U.S. coast. Yet the island’s influences on The us’s cultural imagination are extensive and deeply ingrained.
In the engaging and wide-ranging Havana Habit, author and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat probes the significance of Havana, and of greater Cuba, within the cultural history of the US. Through books, advertisements, trip guides, films, and music, he demonstrates the influence of the island on almost two centuries of American life. From John Quincy Adams’s comparison of Cuba to an apple in a position to drop into The us’s lap, to the recent episodes within the lives of the “comic comandantes and exotic exiles,” and to such notable Cuban exports as the rumba and the mambo, cigars and mojitos, the Cuba that emerges from these pages is a locale that Cubans and Americans have jointly imagined and inhabited. The Havana Habit deftly illustrates what makes Cuba, as Pérez Firmat writes, “so close to and yet so foreign.”