Cuba in the American Imagination. By Louis Pérez, Jr. UNC Press, 274 pages, $34.95

Cuba is our neighbor. It is also a ripe fruit and a bicycle. Cuba is a child, a woman, a damsel in distress, a beautiful mistress. Cuba is a disease, a virus, cancer.

Historian Louis Pérez has documented hundreds of such metaphors that U.S. policymakers and politicians have used. And for him, these comparisons are not mere oversimplifications, but dangerous linguistic traps. Pérez says, “If you can persuade people that Cuba is a damsel in distress, then you know what you have to do: save her.”

In 2003, curious whether the Cuba-as-metaphor phenomenon had seeped into popular culture, Pérez searched travel books, tour guides, fiction, song lyrics, newspapers, and magazines.

“I spent more hours than I care to admit turning the microfilm reader, looking for editorial cartoons,” Pérez says. He found many examples of Cubans depicted as crying, savage babies being led aright by Uncle Sam.

In 2008, Pérez published his book, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos.

The metaphor that portrays Cuba as a child is perhaps the most powerful. Used often during the early twentieth century, its meaning was clear: the United States had to be the parent. And how could a responsible parent hand over the reins of self-government to children? The result of this thinking was the Platt Amendment, which essentially allowed the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it felt like it.

“But the Cuban leaders were educated men,” Pérez says. “Were the founding fathers of the United States children because they had never self-governed?”

In 1960, a year after anti-U.S. dictator Fidel Castro came to power, Cuba turned into a virus. Only two years earlier it had been a ripe fruit or a mistress.

“A virus can be cured,” Pérez says. It might even go away on its own. The Eisenhower administration pursued a wait-and-see policy toward Cuba. But, Pérez says, later that year and into the Kennedy era, when Castro would not bend to the will of the United States and turned to the Soviet Union, Cuba became a cancer that had to be contained or excised. (To wit, the Bay of Pigs or Operation Mongoose.)

Cuba might be a country with a leader you loathe and an oppressive government, Pérez says. “But it’s not cancer.” So don’t call it that.

“If you accept the metaphor,” Pérez says, “if you don’t challenge it, then you are hopelessly caught up in the premise. It’s the premise that has to be confronted.”