The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai'i

For half a century, the United States has treated Cuba and Hawai'i as polar opposites: despised nation and beloved state. But for more than a century before the Cuban revolution and Hawaiian statehood of 1959, Cuba and Hawai'i figured as twin objects of U.S. imperial desire and as possessions whose tropical island locales might support all manner of fantasy fulfillment—cultural, financial, and geopolitical.

Using travel and tourism as sites where the pleasures of imperialism met the politics...