We couldn’t miss the Book Fair › Cuba › Granma

There’s no better feeling for an avid reader than returning home with a good number of books. Even if it increases the seemingly endless to-read list and reduces the space to store them. That’s when the decision of which books to keep and which to discard comes into play, even if it stings a little.
In previous years, I don’t recall returning from the Havana International Book Fair so laden with books. Perhaps my criteria for choosing what to read weren’t the same, but I also justify it with the variety of titles that, despite the difficulties, were available to the public at this 34th edition of the event.
It’s true that the usual venue, the San Carlos de la Cabaña Fortress, offered amenities that the Cultural Station at Línea and 18th Streets couldn’t replicate. The limited space, the August heat, the lack of electricity, and the transportation problems make it easy to understand the public’s questions about the quality of this literary celebration.
However, in this edition, I defended with even greater force a premise that, for years, I’ve repeated to the friends who accompany me: The true reader will always find something to take home. And that luck arises even at the most unexpected stands. Nothing compares to that surprise.
My idea remained relevant and was made possible thanks to the efforts of our cultural institutions, the remarkable achievement of the Territorial Publishing System (SET) of our printing industry, and the solidarity of sister nations.
This latter solidarity materialized in actions such as the opportunity to access, free of charge, the Selected Pages of Rosario Castellanos, published by Casa de las Américas, thanks to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s office in Mexico. And that same country offered us young people, also free of charge, the 25 for 25 collection—presented by Miguel Ignacio Díaz Reynoso, Mexico’s ambassador to Cuba, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica—at the behest of Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum.
How else could we have explored the solitude, grief, and love in the poetry of Colombian writer Piedad Bonnett; or the stories of Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias in Week-end in Guatemala? There wouldn’t be enough space to mention all the other authors in this collection, such luminaries as Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Eduardo Galeano, Amparo Dávila, and many others.
Once again, several publishing houses, including Letras Cubanas and Arte y Literatura, offered the Biblioteca del Pueblo collection, and some titles sold out, a testament to its popularity.
For those with more discerning tastes, La Manigua bookstore, located in the cultural center of the same name, sold secondhand books throughout the week at lower prices than its usual location, and in exquisite bindings.
Likewise, the success of the book fair, which celebrated its 26th anniversary and arrived at the event with more than 350 new titles, was evident in the large number of books published by imprints such as Ediciones Loynaz (Pinar del Río) and La Luz (Holguín).
It’s true that print runs aren’t as high as in previous years, and that copies sometimes sell out after the launch, but imagine the immense effort the publishing teams put in to bring their new releases to the capital.
It was a difficult Book Fair for everyone. And in future editions, the experience of Línea and 18 will help in finding solutions to the power outages—which affected something as essential as online payments—and in achieving greater collaboration among all the publishing stakeholders.
But we couldn’t miss this celebration. Our award-winning authors deserved it, as did those emerging writers who saw their books published for the first time, and of course, the public. It was a respite in such difficult circumstances. A breath of life within the pages of a book. An opportunity to keep dreaming.