Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the beginning of the “Project 25 for 25” Dec. 17, what will be the free distribution of 2.5 million books to young people aged 15 to 30 across Latin America. Simultaneously, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez did the same in Havana.
The collection of titles by well-known authors throughout the hemisphere involved a number of governments and was advanced by the Fondo de Cultura Económica, a government-funded publishing house based in Mexico.
“The construction of consciousness and collective reflection that a book provides can never be provided by social media,” Sheinbaum said.
The list of titles and authors whose works are being circulated include Operation Carlota by Gabriel García Márquez; The Forbidden Stories of Little Thumb by Roque Dalton; Weekend in Guatemala by Miguel Ángel Asturias; The Fox by Sergio Ramírez; The Wonderful Brief Life of Ernesto Guevara by Eduardo Galeano; and Geographies by Mario Benedetti. The authors come from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Uruguay, Colombia and more.
Díaz-Canel hailed the initiative taken by the Mexican president. “‘Project 25 for 25’ was born out of a simple and powerful conviction: the youth of Latin America and the Caribbean deserve to have books in their hands, not just in display cases,” he told a crowd in Havana.
Ever since its triumph 67 years ago, the Cuban Revolution has placed a top priority on raising the cultural level of the workers and peasants, a precondition to their taking the revolution into their own hands. Fidel Castro, the central leader of the revolution, said, “We don’t tell the people: Believe! We tell them: read!”
“The Cuban Revolution has never ceased to stimulate literary creation and production, from the National Printing House, which became the Cuban Book Institute,” Díaz-Canel said, “and the book campaigns and fairs that, over time, have become authentic celebrations of books and reading throughout the Cuban archipelago.”
This course was at the heart of the 1961 literacy campaign, initiated by Castro, where 100,000 youth from the cities, many in their teens, went to the countryside to teach rural workers and peasants to read and write. And the volunteers got an education themselves from the toilers.
While called “25 for 25,” the number of titles by Latin American authors being freely distributed is actually 27, given the enthusiastic response by the authors or their families to being part of this project.
“Literature is a form of resistance,” Clara Brugada Molina, head of the government in Mexico City, told the crowd there.
“Books are being printed right now in Colombia, in Argentina, in Chile, in Peru and in Mexico,” Paco Ignacio Taibo, director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, said. “At this moment, there are book distribution events taking place in parallel with this one: in the city of La Plata, in the province of Buenos Aires; in Santiago, Chile”; in Lima, Peru; Havana; Caracas, Venezuela; and elsewhere. The distributions will continue, to youth and to libraries, reading clubs, and, in some countries, to military bases.