Moon Travel Guides: Your World, Your Way Enchanting music, incredible cuisine, classic cars, and stunning natural beauty: Cuba may be just an island, but it has a big impact on everyone who visits. Dive right in with Moon Cuba. Easy-to-use itineraries, with week-long trip suggestions tailored for adventurers, party animals, nature-lovers, beach bums, history buffs, and more Activities and unique ideas for every traveler: Hike the revolutionary trails of the Sierra Maestra trod by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, or relax on sparkling beaches. Savor delectable criollo cuisine, indulge in the world's finest cigars, or sip mojitos and cuba libres made from the best Cuban rum. Explore colonial cities with cobbled plazas and cathedrals, or jade mountains full of dramatic rock formations. Discover the ins and outs of Cuba's nightlife, from salsa dancing to LGBT hotspots. Recommendations on outdoor recreation, including birding, horseback riding, fishing, cycling, and hiking, as well as the best beaches for diving, snorkeling, and sunbathing Honest advice from award-winning travel writer Christopher P. Baker on the country he has studied for decades Full-color photos and detailed maps and directions for exploring on your own Background information on the landscape, history, government, and culture, including a Spanish phrasebook A comprehensive guide to travel laws, visas and officialdom, and health and safety tips Essential insight for travelers on transportation and accommodations, packaged in a book light enough to fit in your carry-on With Moon Cuba's practical tips, myriad activities, and local insight, you can plan your trip your way. Island-hopping around the Caribbean? Try Moon Aruba or Moon Jamaica.

Most books on the Cuban Missile Crisis tell the story using the memoirs of those who advised President Kennedy as he struggled to avoid World War III. This book is the only known personal account of the lead photographic reconnaissance squadron's scouting dangerous low-level operations, flying the supersonic RF-8A Crusader, during the classified Operation Blue Moon. Captain Ecker was the commanding officer of US Navy Light Photographic Squadron 62 (VFP-62, otherwise known as “Fightin' Photo”) during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a team created for reconnaissance and aerial photography, and consulted on the movie Thirteen Days, which included dramatic scenes of his first mission over Cuba on October 23, 1962. Blue Moon over Cuba is an authoritative and complete account of the low-level reconnaissance that might be said to have helped JFK avert nuclear Armageddon.

Touring the commercial graphic culture of pre-Castro Cuba, photography curator Levi and senior art director for The New York Times Heller present color reproductions of postcards, tourism advertisements, cigar boxes, music poster, hotel advertisements, and other items that combined graphic styles from the United States with a distinctive Cuban style. A brief introductory essay extols the virtue of this "golden age" of graphic design, noting that Cuba was portrayed as a "paradise" (for wealthy Americans and Europeans). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Edgar Award finalist: A “hypnotic” crime novel set in Cuba after the collapse of the USSR (Tim McLoughlin, author of Heart of the Old Country). One hungry, hallucinatory night in the dark heart of Havana, Mano Rodriguez, a young doctor with the revolutionary medical service, comes to the aid of a teenage jinetera named Julia. She takes refuge in his clinic to break away from the abusive chulo who prostituted her, and they form an unlikely allegiance that Mano thinks might save him from his twin burdens: the dead-end hospital assignment he was delegated after being blacklisted by the Cuban Communist Party, and a Palo Monte curse on his love life commissioned by a vengeful ex-wife. But when the pimp and his bodyguards come after Julia and Mano, the violent chain reaction plunges them all into the decadent catacombs of Havana’s criminal underworld . . . “In the weeks before Hurricane Andrew sweeps down on Cuba in 1992, Dr. Mano Rodriguez is caught up in intrigue in this thoughtful, lushly detailed neo-noir.” —Publishers Weekly “A sad, surreal, beautiful tour of the hell that was Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The writing is hypnotic, the storytelling superb. Havana Lunar is perfect.” —Tim McLoughlin, editor, Brooklyn Noir

With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959. Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records and oral interviews to popular magazines, novels, and motion pictures--Perez reveals a powerful web of everyday, bilateral connections between the United States and Cuba and shows how U.S. cultural forms had a critical influence on the development of Cubans' sense of themselves as a people and as a nation. He also articulates the cultural context for the revolution that erupted in Cuba in 1959. In the middle of the twentieth century, Perez argues, when economic hard times and political crises combined to make Cubans painfully aware that their American-influenced expectations of prosperity and modernity would not be realized, the stage was set for revolution.

"[DePalma] renders a Cuba few tourists will ever see . . . You won't forget these people soon, and you are bound to emerge from DePalma's bighearted account with a deeper understanding of a storied island . . . A remarkably revealing glimpse into the world of a muzzled yet irrepressibly ebullient neighbor."--The New York Times Modern Cuba comes alive in a vibrant portrait of a group of families's varied journeys in one community over the last twenty years. Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long. In Guanabacoa, longtime residents prove enterprising in the extreme. Scrounging materials in the black market, Cary Luisa Limonta Ewen has started her own small manufacturing business, a surprising turn for a former ranking member of the Communist Party. Her good friend Lili, a loyal Communist, heads the neighborhood's watchdog revolutionary committee. Artist Arturo Montoto, who had long lived and worked in Mexico, moved back to Cuba when he saw improving conditions but complains like any artist about recognition. In stark contrast, Jorge García lives in Miami and continues to seek justice for the sinking of a tugboat full of refugees, a tragedy that claimed the lives of his son, grandson, and twelve other family members, a massacre for which the government denies any role. In The Cubans, many patriots face one new question: is their loyalty to the revolution, or to their country? As people try to navigate their new reality, Cuba has become an improvised country, an old machine kept running with equal measures of ingenuity and desperation. A new kind of revolutionary spirit thrives beneath the conformity of a half century of totalitarian rule. And over all of this looms the United States, with its unpredictable policies, which warmed towards its neighbor under one administration but whose policies have now taken on a chill reminiscent of the Cold War.

West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba seeks to explain how a series of historical events that occurred in West Africa from the mid-1790s - including Afonja's rebellion, the Owu wars, the Fulani-led jihad, and the migrations to Egbaland - had an impact upon life in cities and plantations in western Cuba and Bahia. Manuel Barcia examines the extent to which a series of African-led plots and armed movements that took place in western Cuba and Bahia between 1807 and 1844 were the result - or a continuation - of events that had occurred in and around the Yoruba and Hausa kingdoms in the same period. Why did these two geographical areas serve as the theatre for the uprising of the Nagos, the Lucumis, and other West African men and women? The answer, Barcia argues, relates to the fact that plantation economies supported by unusually large numbers of African-born slaves from the same - or close - geographical and ethnic heritage, which transformed the rural and urban landscape in western Cuba and Bahia. To understand why these two areas followed such similar social patterns it is essential to look across the Atlantic - it is not enough to repeat the significance of the African background of Bahian and Cuban slaves. By establishing connections between people and events, with a special emphasis on their warfare experiences, Barcia presents a coherent narrative which spans more than three decades and opens a wealth of archival research for future study.