Vol. 73/No. 8      March 2, 2009

Speaking at the February 12 opening ceremony, Minister of Culture Abel Prieto noted that since it began 25 years ago the annual book fair has become the country’s major cultural event. The revolutionary government and Communist Party of Cuba, he said, were determined that the book fair be held despite the $10 billion in damages caused by three major hurricanes in the second half of last year.

“Culture is a right, not a luxury,” Prieto said, quoting Fernando Ortiz, one of Cuba’s foremost 20th century writers on the country’s culture and national identity.

From the beginning, Prieto remarked, Cuba’s revolutionary leadership has made a priority of widening access to culture and education for the broad masses of the Cuban people. He noted that within months of the January 1959 revolutionary victory, two major cultural institutions were founded, Casa de las Américas and the national film institute ICAIC.

In 1961, the revolutionary government established art schools that opened their doors to youth from working-class and rural families, and 100,000 volunteer teachers went into the countryside, virtually wiping out illiteracy within a year.

Prieto noted that the founding president of Casa de las Américas was Haydée Santamaría, a heroine of the 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks, which opened the revolutionary struggle led by the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army under the leadership of Fidel Castro. Casa de las Américas publishes a literary magazine by the same name and sponsors a prestigious literary contest for writers from across Latin America and the Caribbean.

This year’s book fair is dedicated to celebrating Casa’s 50th anniversary. The institution’s current president, well-known essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar, also addressed the opening ceremony.

Prieto recalled that even in the worst years of the 1990s, when Cuba experienced a deep economic and social crisis after the abrupt end of favorable trade relations and aid from the Soviet Union, the revolutionary leadership was determined that resources for promoting literature, music, and art be maintained.

He said the same approach is being taken today in face of the hurricane damage. This year, more than 1,000 new books were scheduled to be published in time to go on sale in 46 shops across Havana two weeks prior to the opening of the fair.

After 10 days in Havana, the book fair will travel to 16 other cities across the island, culminating in Santiago de Cuba in the east. The number of cities has been scaled back from previous years due to the post-hurricane rebuilding priorities. A “mountain book festival,” however, will be held in March, bringing new titles to the more remote areas of the Escambray mountains in central Cuba. Nationwide, some 6 million books will be available for purchase through the fair.

Here in Havana, the literary fair includes poetry readings, a forum on the world economic crisis, book awards, and hundreds of book presentations. Art shows, concerts, and ballet performances are being staged in conjunction with the festival. Dozens of publishers from Cuba and other countries have booths at the book fair. As in previous years, one of them is Pathfinder Press.

In attendance at the opening ceremony were Cuban president Raúl Castro and the president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet. Chile is the country of honor at this year’s event. The fair is also dedicated to two prominent Cuban writers, poet Fina García Marruz, winner of the 1990 national literature prize, and historian Jorge Ibarra Cuesta, who was awarded the national social science prize in 1996.

Ibarra, who is known for his writings on Cuban history of the 19th and 20th centuries, addressed the inauguration.

As a youth Ibarra was a founding member of the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate, one of the organizations that took part in the revolutionary struggle against the Batista dictatorship and later came together to form the Communist Party of Cuba.

During the 1950s, as president of the Federation of University Students in Santiago de Cuba, he was expelled from the University of Oriente for his political activity. As a member of the revolutionary underground, he also took part in political activities in Mexico and the United States.

Interviewed by the weekly newspaper Trabajadores, Ibarra, 78, said his work as a historian “cannot be separated from my participation in the revolutionary process.” He always “sought out what was hidden or ignored by bourgeois historians, in order to uncover the tendencies toward revolutionary change that were present at given conjunctures but were silenced by the official historiography.” He added that “Marx once wrote, ‘Only the truth is revolutionary.’”
 
 
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