America's Forgotten Colony: Cuba's Isle of Pines (Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations)

Most current writing about Cuban-American relations views history through the filter of Fidel Castro and a half-century of separation. This meticulously researched and compellingly written book looks beyond that - to the years following the explosion of the Maine, when American investors flocked to Cuba and American settlers followed them to Cuba’s Isle of Pines looking for financial success and a frontier Utopia on what would certainly soon be American soil. Dr. Neagle focuses his very readable scholarship on their motivations, their hopes, their successes, and their ultimate failures, as well as on the way they were received by the local “pineros,” who both welcomed and resented them in varying degrees through more than five decades. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in avoiding old mistakes and suspicions as we get to know each other again.

I bought this to research ancestors of mine who lived on the Isle, but It turned out to be an interesting read on Cuba’s history prior to Castro. It focuses heavily on various foreign interests in Cuba leading up to communist rule, including what happened to the small group of American colonists who were there when it all happened.

This is a great book! If you enjoy history, or appreciate a good story, do yourself a favor and read Mike Neagle's book. It documents an ambitious decades-long project in which US settlers traveled to Cuba's Isle of Pines (now Isle of Youth) in hopes of creating a formal US colony off the Cuba mainland. Neagle's book displays the fits and starts of the ultimately doomed effort and populates his story with remarkable characters and exciting events. The work takes a long-view and traces activity at the Isle from the early twentieth century to the 1959 Cuban Revolution and concludes with contemporary events (the recent normalization of US-Cuban relations). I cannot strongly enough recommend this book, what an impressive debut from the author!

This a very esoteric subject so not a lot to choose. The book needs EDITING! Too many mis-pellings and after being told that the US citizen population got down to 200 for the thirty-fifth time I was about to throw the book across the room!?! Still .. with only two books in English to be found glad it is in my library on Cuba.

A very well written and informative book that is a must read for anyone interested in the details of America's relationship with Cuba. Dr Neagle's research and writing bring to life what it was like to be on the Isle of Pines in the period from the 1890s to the 1960s. He charts the rise and fall of American efforts to colonize the island and puts the actions of individuals into a social context that most of us know little about today. His writings spurred me to learn more about why my own family bought property on the island at the height of the gilded age in the early 1900s but never developed it.

Help a friend research family history.

Carefully researched and plainly written. Comprehensive coverage of a little known subject

This is a heavily researched and very readable gem of a book. It fills in a lot of important details about life on Isle of Pines. I was particularly interested in settler life before 1910. Neagle's book historically details the mood in America at the time, targeted populations and regions, American politics and annexation. Many Americans then probably assumed that Isle of Pines was going to go the way of Hawaii in the late 1800s. This all helps better explain why American settlers moved to Isle of Pines instead of, say, homesteading in the western U.S. Thanks to the author's kind personal clarification, I learned that single women were not known to be settlers there as did occur in the homesteading West. While the author remained professionally neutral in position throughout the book, this is also a historical example of America's imperialistic mindset and glossy marketing and recruitment by American fruit companies.