HAVANA—Cuba’s annual book fair opened to the public this weekend as tens of thousands flocked into the historic La Cabaña fortress to buy books. The opening ceremony, Feb. 9, heard remarks from Zuleica Romay, head of the Cuban Book Institute; and from Zoila Lapique, a national social science prize winner, and Ambrosio Fornet. This year’s event is dedicated to the latter two.

A major focus of this year’s fair is the cultures of the peoples of the Caribbean. There is a considerable presence of publishers and cultural figures from the region and a number of panels on aspects of the literature, culture and the class struggle in the Caribbean, “building bridges over the barriers of language and distance which have always separated people culturally so close” in the words of the daily book fair broadsheet.

In his remarks, Fornet, a national literature prize winner, spoke of the huge cultural expansion that followed the revolution’s triumph—including the 1961 literacy campaign and the establishment of the national printing press—and to the challenges facing the revolution today. Speaking positively of measures being taken to increase production, he warned against the idea that “economic profitability” could become a guide to policies in the cultural sphere, and underscored the need to be on guard against the “lure of the market.”

In addition to publishing books and putting on plays, concerts and ballet, he said, we must continually assess how we’re doing in pushing back “machismo, homophobia, social indiscipline, racial prejudice, administrative corruption and the vicious burdens that came with the crisis of the 1990s,” triggered by the collapse of trade with the Soviet Union.

—JONATHAN SILBERMAN
AND MAURA DELUCA