Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.5.2.0211
• Published date: 01 October 2013
• Date: 01 October 2013
• Pages: 211142-213
• Author: Steve Ludlam

BOOKREVIEWS 211

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to the revolutionary project or a desire to defend its legacy. Anne Luke echoes

this trend, arguing that disinterest among youth threatens the longevity of the

movement. Youth, considered the vanguard of the revolution, now represents a

resistance, or at minimum, apathy towards it, she claims. Indeed, the futures of

any society are ‘laid at the feet of young people’, as Luke says about the Cuban

youth (p. 142). Yet Luke and Casamayor-Cisneros underscore an inf‌initely more

diff‌icult problem. Where other societies merely transition from one generation

to the next, Cuban leaders are in the business of preserving the revolution as the

core of society and elongating its relevance. Unfortunately, their clients are a

generation of disinterested youths, a situation that forecasts a dire future.

The variety of conclusions and their contradictions – exemplif‌ied in

Cuba’s duelling qualities of adaptation in areas like international affairs and

headstrongness in domestic race relations – makes this book an awfully compelling

publication. Fifty years after the revolution, the Cuban government proves to be,

at the same time, f‌lexible and rigid, both benevolent and authoritarian. While

stubbornly immovable in some areas, the government can exercise adaptation

and humanitarianism in others. The legacy remains uneven across politics,

culture, and identity, yet each topic therein holds potential for scholars with new

interpretations.

David Grantham, Texas Christian University, USA

Salim Lamrani, The Economic War against Cuba: a Historical and Legal

Perspective on the US Blockade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013)

pb 142pp. ISBN 9781583673409

Reviewed by Steve Ludlam

English-language readers of the work of Salim Lamrani, a French academic,

will be mainly familiar with his scholarly online journalism, characterised by

the combination of richly referenced detail with clear and strong argument. His

subject matter has frequently been the unending ‘regime change’ efforts of the

US state against the Republic of Cuba, the terrorism and the dubious claims and

morals of many prominent US-supported Cuban dissidents. Lamrani routinely

heads straight for the most controversial topics in hostile media coverage of Cuba

and offers an alternative perspective underpinned (unlike most of the journalism)

by serious investigation and argument. Less well known are his books on Cuba

and US and EU policy, published in French, one with a preface by Nelson

Mandela. This concise study remedies this wider literary gap in access in English

to his writing. Once again the mixture of careful presentation of historical, legal

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