Salim Lamrani

Superpower Principles demonstrates the pitfalls of a punk attitude toward publishing. It contains valuable information and commentary, but this is marred by the book’s many flaws, which weaken its ability to influence anyone who is not already certain about the brutality and injustice of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Careless mistakes, inept translations, and generally shoddy editorial standards introduce needless confusion, undermine the book’s authority, and make the work less useful to readers than it should have been. This anthology does assemble an impressive array of leftist intellectuals and experts on Cuban-American affairs. Its 16 essays are arranged in two sections — “U.S. Terrorism against Cuba” and “The Story of the Cuban Five” — but in fact nearly all the contributions comment on behalf of the “Cuban Five” political prisoners, detained since 1998 on absurd conspiracy charges. The bias and corruption of those proceedings are obvious enough that several essays amount to a “piling on,” with considerable repetition. Only a few essays are sourced with footnotes; the most valuable of these are William Blum’s survey of covert operations against Cuba, Piero Gleijeses’ short history of Cuban intervention against apartheid South Africa, and defense counsel Leonard Weinglass’s cogent review of the Cuban Five trial. The contributions by the well known Noam Chomsky, Nadine Gordimer, and Howard Zinn break no new ground and do not represent their authors’ best work. It was unclear to me whether all the essays were written especially for this book. Of course there is no index, map, or chronology of events.… (meer)