"Somos we are: five contemporary cuban poets" represents a significant effort by New York-based Times Change Press to circulate revolutionary Cuban poetry in the United States during the height of the U.S. blockade. The cover design by Su Negrin features a hand-drawn illustration by Cuban artist Nuez depicting a revolutionary fighter with rifle standing beside a royal palm and sun—iconic symbols of Cuban identity—rendered in expressive blue ink lines with cream highlights against a burnt orange field. The loose, sketchy quality evokes both folk art traditions and the immediacy of revolutionary graphics, translating Cuban visual aesthetics for North American solidarity audiences.
Edited by Anita Whitney, who lived and worked in Cuba from 1960 to 1968, the bilingual anthology presents poems by five major voices of revolutionary Cuban literature: Nicolás Guillén, Belkis Cuza Malé, Guillermo Rodríguez, Nancy Morejón, and Victor Casáus. The back cover explicitly frames the publication as resistance to the U.S. blockade, arguing that Cuba's revolutionary example was "spreading throughout the world" despite American efforts at containment. Times Change Press, a radical leftist publisher committed to anti-imperialist politics and alternative consciousness, positioned this collection within broader American revolutionary movements of the late 1960s. The publication demonstrates how Cuban cultural production circulated through international solidarity networks, with translations by American community members living in Cuba, creating vital connections between Cuban revolutionary poetry and U.S. New Left activism.