HAVANA—“How can they know about truth, those who speak ill of books?” “We don’t tell people ‘believe,’ we say ‘read!’”

Signs containing quotes like these from Cuban national hero José Martí and President Fidel Castro, respectively, were prominent at the Havana International Book Fair. They captured the spirit of this annual cultural festival, which took place February 6-15 this year.

The event featured book presentations, roundtable discussions, poetry readings, concerts, films, plays, and other cultural events. Cuban publishers subsequently traveled across the country with the book fair, reaching 33 additional cities and towns, ending March 7 in the island’s second city, Santiago de Cuba. According to María Mederos, head of the organizing committee for the fair, 460,000 people attended this year’s event in Havana, a 10 percent increase over last year. They bought a total of more than 1 million books. The photo in the middle shows visitors checking out new titles in the fair’s central store, where most books sold for around 10 pesos each.

As in previous years, Pathfinder Press had a busy stand at the fair (top). Frank García, a student at Havana University, was one of those who returned to the stand—as he has done year after year—on the lookout for Pathfinder’s new titles on revolutionary politics and for discussion with members of Pathfinder’s international team of volunteers (bottom, Arnar Sigurdsson from Iceland talks with interested visitors). Others, like carpenter Ramón Gutiérrez, discovered Pathfinder books for the first time. Dozens of Venezuelan youth currently studying at the nearby School of Social Work were among those who came by the Pathfinder booth.