Local lawyer’s book acquired by Portuguese publisher

(CNS): Work by local lawyer, armature historian and author Peter Polack is about to be published in Portuguese by Sextante, an imprint of the largest Portuguese publishing group Porto Editora. A significant African history book, Black Stalingrad by Peter Polack, is about the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Angola (1987-1988), in an obscure war that appeared to herald great changes in southern Africa as well as the end of the apartheid government in South Africa. Polack has previously released a list of Cuban casualties of the Angolan war published in the Miami Herald and written an opinion editorial for the South Africa Times on Cuito's fallen.

He has also been interviewed about the book by the Portuguese service of Voice of America.

The Portuguese edition of the book is to be published and distributed throughout Portugal and Lusophone Africa in the summer of 2012 on the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

Polack says his interest in Angola was sparked by a meeting in 1992 with two Cuban refugees who had fought in Angola. He then made a trip to Cuba itself where he acquired several books on the war in Angola. "This was when I first heard about Cuito Cuanavale" and the battle that took place there in 1987 and 1988 where two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, "collided in a monstrous battle fought by their satellite nations of Cuba and South Africa who were assisting" Angolan groups.

The battle was significant, Polack says, because it represented the last major incursion in Southern Africa by Russia and USA, the start of the Angolan peace process, the end of Cuban international intervention, and the end of the cold war.

He says the battle itself is of great interest because no non-Cuban, South African, Angolan, Soviet or US author has written an objective, accurate, politically neutral and readable version of the fighting, because it is one of the last major land battles of this century described variously as the largest single conventional military engagement on the African continent since the Battle of Al Alamein, as the African Stalingrad or Angola's Verdun.

Peter Polack was born in Jamaica in 1958 and has been a criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands since 1983 where he resides with his wife and two daughters.
In July 2005 he organized a Cuba relief shipment after Hurricane Dennis from generous donors of the Cayman Islands. He visited Cuba for the first time in June 2009.