Cuba—mysterious, intoxicating, captivating. Whether you’re planning to go or have just returned, Cuba, Hot and Cold is essential for your bookshelf. With a keen eye and dry wit, author Tom Miller takes readers on an intimate journey from Havana to the places you seldom find in guidebooks. A brilliant raconteur and expert on Cuba, Miller is full of enthralling behind-the-scenes stories. His subjects include one of the world’s most resourceful master instrument makers, the famous photo of Che Guevara, and the explosion of the USS Maine. A veteran of the underground press of the 1960s, Miller describes the day Cuba’s State Security detained him for distributing copies of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration of 1948 and explains how the dollar has become the currency of necessity. His warm reminiscences explain the complexities of life in Cuba. Since his first visit to the island thirty years ago, Miller has shown us the real people of Havana and the countryside, the Castros and their government, and the protesters and their rigor. His first book on Cuba, Trading with the Enemy, brought readers into the “Special Period,” Fidel’s name for the country’s period of economic free fall. Cuba, Hot and Cold brings us up to date, providing intimate and authentic glimpses of day-to-day life.

Granted unprecedented access to travel throughout the country, this lively travelogue presents us with rare insight into one of the world's only Communist countries. "Havana knew me by my shoes," begins Tom Miller's lively and entertaining account of his sojourn for more than eight months traveling through Cuba, mixing with its literati and black marketers, its cane cutters and cigar rollers. Its best-known personalities and ordinary citizens talk to him about the U.S. embargo and tell their favorite Fidel jokes as they stand in line for bread at the Socialism or Death Bakery. Miller provides a running commentary on Cuba's food shortages, exotic sensuality, and baseball addiction as he follows the scents of Graham Greene, Joséarti, Ernest Hemingway, and the Mambo Kings. The result of this informed and adventurous journey is a vibrant, rhythmic portrait of a land and people too long shielded from American eyes.

Critically acclaimed author Tom Miller reveals the making and marketing of one Panama hat, from the straw fields of Ecuador’s coastal lowland to a hat shop in Southern California. Along the way, the hat becomes a literary device allowing Miller to give us his impressions from the tributaries of the Amazon to the mountainsides of the Andes. The Panama Hat Trail is at once a study in global economics and a lively travelogue.