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Vol. 75/No. 8      February 28, 2011

 
Cuba International Book
Fair opens in Havana
 
BY NAOMI CRAINE
AND JOHN HAWKINS
 
HAVANA—“Fifty years ago, thousands of Cuban youth waged one of the most beautiful battles in this revolution,” said Zuleica Romay, president of the Cuban Book Institute. Speaking at the February 10 inauguration of the Cuba International Book Fair, Romay described how young people traveled the “valleys and mountains, workshops and factories … to teach more than a million of their compatriots to read and write.”

The 1961 literacy campaign “was the victorious revolution’s first mass cultural action,” she said. It began a process that has “transformed reading into a spiritual need for broad layers of the Cuban population.”

The annual book fair has become a nationwide event, traveling to each province. Last year it attracted more than 2 million people across the island. Starting in Havana February 10-20, it will close March 6 in Santiago de Cuba in the east.

Cuban publishers have made available some 2,000 titles, including 600 for children and teenagers, and a total of 6 million books for sale at highly subsidized prices, Romay noted. This is an increase over last year’s program. Dozens of publishers from abroad are also participating, among them Pathfinder Press. The fair is based at San Carlos de la Cabaña, an 18th century Spanish fort overlooking Havana Bay. Hundreds of book presentations, panel discussions, concerts, film showings, and other cultural events are part of the fair program. This year many of these events are being organized at additional venues in central Havana, making it easier for many to attend them than was the case for previous fair events located only at La Cabaña.

The theme of this year’s book fair is the commemoration of the bicentennial of independence struggles throughout Latin America and the 220th anniversary of the beginning of the Haitian revolution. It is dedicated to two Cuban writers, Jaime Sarusky and Fernando Martínez Heredia, both of whom spoke briefly at the inaugural ceremony.

Sarusky, a novelist and literary journalist, won the National Prize for literature in 2004. Martínez Heredia, who as a teenager participated in the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, was editor of the Marxist magazine Pensamiento Crítico and head of the philosophy department at the University of Havana from 1966 to 1971. In 2006 he was awarded the National Prize for Social Sciences.

In his remarks at the inauguration, Sarusky noted that before the revolution there was little publishing in Cuba. The most prominent Cuban authors often had to publish their works abroad. The scope of the book fair shows how much that has changed.

The socialist revolution changed Cuba entirely—“the people’s lives, our ideas, our feelings,” Martínez said. Today “the general level of political consciousness is practically unequaled in the world.” This makes it possible to “advance toward strengthening socialism.” He was referring to the discussions taking place among millions of Cubans on measures by the revolutionary government to confront the economic challenges facing the revolution.

“We know this will be difficult,” he said. But from the beginning the course of the Cuban Revolution was shaped “by the action, determination, and self-sacrifice of the masses who organized themselves, fought, and united.” Today “they can do so again.”  
 
 
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