The new bookshop is located centrally. It’s about a 15-minute walk from the packinghouse area in the city and five minutes from the large SKF roller-bearing factory in a working class area in Gamlestaden. As the store opened, municipal workers across the country were expanding their strike for higher wages.

Östling said that volunteers from the Pathfinder bookstore in Stockholm have participated in the Gothenburg book fair every year since 1992. Volunteers at the Pathfinder stand have been asked many times: "Where can I get these books?" Now they can get them at the Pathfinder bookshop here, Östling said.

She explained that the bookstore was launched at this location after members of the Communist League and Young Socialists carried out consistent propaganda work in the broader area over the last 18 months including through weekly plant-gate sales and book tables in the streets.

Volunteers transformed a raw basement into a nice-looking bookstore, with funds contributed by supporters of this effort from Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Malmö. The carpet was laid by a meat packer who is a coworker of the director of the new bookstore, Dag Tirsén. Architecture students from Gothenburg helped with the acoustics.

Jonathan Silberman from the Communist League and the director of Pathfinder distribution in London, in the United Kingdom, was one of the featured speakers. He described the importance of expanding the sales of Pathfinder literature, as well as the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, in today’s world of growing capitalist disorder and economic depression. "The imperialist rulers are following up their assault on Iraq with a war drive directed against Iran," he said. "These books contain and develop the communist program decisive to building a revolutionary movement in Sweden and other capitalist countries as the class struggle sharpens."

Turcios Esquivel, second secretary of the embassy of Cuba in Sweden, was a special guest. He took the occasion to speak out against the recent escalation of the imperialist-orchestrated campaign against Cuba. The big-business media and capitalist politicians throughout Europe, he noted, claim that the 75 opponents of the Cuban Revolution arrested in March, and three men tried and executed after hijacking a ferry in Havana, were all "dissidents" punished for their political views. The 75 were "mercenaries" working to overthrow the Cuban government financed by Washington, Esquivel said. The hijackers were common criminals who put in danger the lives of many Cubans and tourists, and their actions were encouraged by Washington’s refusal to prosecute any hijackers commandeering Cuban craft or vessels to Florida, and by limiting the number of visas the U.S. government gives to Cubans applying to emigrate, he said.

The 75 opponents of the revolution Esquivel was referring to were convicted in April on charges of collaboration with Washington, a hostile state power, to subvert Cuban sovereignty and overthrow the revolution. The trial and the execution of the three men took place after a string of similar armed hijackings of Cuban boats and planes since last summer.

Catharina Tirsén, a leader of the Communist League in Sweden who chaired the event pointed to a recent debate in the letters page of the daily Göteborg Posten on the propaganda campaign against Cuba. She also took the occasion to condemn the position of Anna Lind, foreign minister of Sweden, who was amongst the first to attack the sentences of the 75. She encouraged participants to learn the truth about the Cuban Revolution, and pointed to an attractive photo display in the bookstore of Pathfinder’s participation in this year’s Havana International Book Fair. Tirsén read a message sent to the celebration from Pathfinder’s French-language editor, Michel Prairie. The new bookshop, Prairie wrote, will aid the reconquering of "Marxist culture among the fighting vanguard of workers and farmers around the world."

Andreas Bergerheim, a member of the Young Socialists and a packing house worker, talked about the books on the shelves, some of which he had recently read and helped him understand what the working class can accomplish to change society.

Many in the audience had joined the international campaign to defend Róger Calero, co-editor of Perspectiva Mundial, against the attempts by U.S. immigration authorities to deport him from the United States. The audience applauded when Joel Britton, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, announced the good news that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has moved to terminate the effort to exclude Calero from that country and raised the possibility of a victory tour in Sweden.

The more than 20 participants, many of them young, came from Stockholm and Gothenburg, as well as the United Kingdom, Iceland, and the United States. A number had first bumped into Pathfinder books at a Communist League book table during the May Day demonstration here two days earlier. One of them picked up a subscription to the Militant and a copy of Capitalism’s World Disorder. Participants contributed the equivalent of $150 towards a fund to cover the costs of opening the new bookstore.  
 
 
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