Preparations for the event have been prominently publicized in the Cuban media. Thousands of working people, students, professionals, and others have been making plans to visit the fair, often saving their money weeks ahead of time to purchase books and pamphlets. Special shuttle buses are being provided to facilitate travel to the fair from different parts of Havana. Last year a record 200,000 people attended.

The popularity and mass character of the book fair here is a product of the Cuban Revolution. In 1961, 100,000 young people mobilized by their revolutionary leadership spread out across the country and wiped out illiteracy in a one-year campaign. For the past four decades, expanding access to education and culture has been a cornerstone of building a society where workers and armers hold power.

The Havana International Book Fair, held since 1984, took place every two years until 2000. Since then it has become an annual event, as publishing in Cuba has steadily recovered from the depths of the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and devastation of Cuba's foreign trade. This year, for the first time, in the three weeks following the Havana event, the book fair will go on the road to some 15 cities in provinces throughout Cuba. This will make books more accessible to hundreds of thousands of Cubans beyond Havana.

Some 66 Cuban publishers and at least 51 foreign publishing houses are expected to have exhibits. This year the fair is dedicated to Cuban poet and author Miguel Barnet. The guest of honor is France, with a special pavilion featuring publishers from that country, as well as seminars and other activities on the works of Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and other French literary figures.

Special presentations will be held on a wide range of books. They include titles by Cuban writers such as Nancy Morejón and Anton Arrufat, U.S authors such as Ray Bradbury and Dashiell Hammett, and Norwegian, African, and Caribbean literature.

A number of titles by prominent participants in the Cuban Revolution will be featured. They include, among others, books by Gen. Raúl Menéndez Tomassevich, a combatant in the Rebel Army, which led the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship to victory in 1959; by Enrique Oltuski, one of the leaders of the underground revolutionary struggle in the cities organized by the July 26 Movement in the late 1950s; and by Orlando Borrego, who fought under the command of Ernesto Che Guevara in the Rebel Army and worked closely with him in the revolutionary government in the early 1960s.

As in previous years, Pathfinder Press has a stand at the Havana book fair, featuring many of its more than 300 titles, which offer the indispensable continuity of the modern working-class movement. Staffing the booth is an international team of workers, Young Socialists, and other supporters of the communist movement from Canada, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Pathfinder is organizing three special presentations at this year's fair. One will launch From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, an interview with Cuban revolutionary Víctor Dreke, who fought in the revolutionary war, was a leader of the struggle to wipe out U.S.-directed counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains in the first half of the 1960s, and was second in command of an internationalist mission in the Congo in 1965 led by Ernesto Che Guevara.

Another event will present Pathfinder's Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas, by Fidel Castro and José Ramón Fernández. Fernández, who will be the featured speaker at the event, commanded the main column in the battle that defeated a U.S.-organized mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

A third event, organized jointly with the Cuban publisher Tricontinental, will present Pathfinder's Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara, the central leader of the 1983–87 popular democratic revolution in the West African country of Burkina Faso, and Equality and Social Participation of Women in Mozambique.

Immediately following the closing of the Havana fair, the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution is sponsoring a series of presentations of From the Escambray to the Congo in half a dozen cities and towns in the central provinces of Villa Clara and Sancti Spíritus. Dreke and the book's editor, Mary-Alice Waters, will present the book in Santa Clara, Sagua la Grande, Placetas, Manicaragua, Sancti Spíritus, Trinidad, and Topes de Collantes. The Association organizes Cuban revolutionary fighters of many generations, ranging from the struggle against the Batista dictatorship to internationalist missions around the world.
 
 
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