For more than two hundred often turbulent years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images - Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. This title offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs.

With particular focus on the pivotal eras of the war of 1898 and the 1959 Cuban revolution, Perez demonstrates how these descriptions served the foreign policy interests of the United States. As charged and coded modes of persuasion and mediation, these images sanctioned and sustained the moral logic of U.S. power over Cuba. Perez further argues that the metaphors in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba were subsequently projected over the world at large.