Havana Int’l Book Fair set for February

By Seth Galinsky
January 30, 2023

The 31st Havana International Book Fair, with the theme “To read is to grow,” will take place Feb. 9-19. This year’s country of honor is Colombia.

This year’s fair also honors Cuban poet and essayist Fina García Marruz, who died last year; Antonio Núñez Jiménez, who became a captain in the Rebel Army during the revolutionary war and wrote over 190 books, ranging from works on the revolution to geography and the study of caves, before his death in 1998; Julio Travieso Serrano, who won the National Literature Award in 2021; and bibliographer Araceli García Carranza.

Despite the impact of the stepped-up U.S. economic war on Cuba — which makes it difficult for Cuba to purchase paper as well as many other essentials — Cuban publishers will offer more than 4 million copies of some 4,200 titles for purchase by the tens of thousands of people who attend the fair. Because of the socialist revolution there, Cuba has one of the highest rates of literacy worldwide. The fair spends 10 days in Havana and then travels around the country.

Like every fair since 1984, Pathfinder Press will be among the international publishers there. Pathfinder publishes and distributes books and pamphlets by leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, on the Cuban Revolution, and by other working-class fighters.

Pathfinder’s latest book, The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward, will be launched in English and Spanish with public presentations at the fair.