Arturo and I are thrilled to have the opportunity to publish LITTLE BROTHER as a series in SWING VOTE MAGAZINE. Our book combines nonfiction narrative stories with political, economic, and legal analysis. Interviews we conducted and experiences we shared are depicted as truly as our notes and memories permit. Some liberties were taken with the dialog, however, to preserve the narrative flow. In other cases, while portraying events where neither of us was present, we relied on publicly available sources or the first-hand recollections of others. When describing, in particular, the earliest days spent in Mexico City by Che Guevara and the two Castro Brothers, and the later role played by Raúl Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis, we relied very heavily on the accounts found in Jon Lee Anderson's definitive biography of the Argentine doctor, titled Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Grove Press 1997).
This experiment with the new media will not easily accommodate a lengthy bibliography, detailed endnotes, or index. Accordingly, the series will run without a formal listing of sources. If we publish LITTLE BROTHER in a more traditional book format, we intend to correct those omissions. Generally in our more analytical sections, we name the commentators and authors we quote. Our apologies to those we do not. Inquiries concerning sources and citations will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
We hope you, the readers of SWING VOTE MAGAZINE, will enjoy and learn from our efforts to illuminate the changes happening in Cuba under its new president. We also hope that, in the near future, the U.S. will lift its Embargo of the island and you will be able to travel there freely to judge for yourself.
Harlan Abrahams
April 2010
Bob Marley, "Zimbabwe" (1979)