CUBA: Fair Bait for a Nation of Book Worms

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Feb 8 1996 (IPS) - The Cuban population, readers par excellence, flocked to the public opening of the VII International Havana Book Fair, Thursday.

The fair, which will run until Feb. 13, was once merely another option, but is now a true exclusive in a nation whose publishing industry was one of the first victims of the five year economic crisis.

Not even virtual reality has stopped Havanans thumbing through, reading, buying and even robbing books, and the organisers are expecting 200,000 people to visit the fair.

The booksellers exhibition includes nearly 2,000 titles from 27 countries and they are predicting sales of some 200,000 publications.

Sources in the Cuban Book Institute said Cuba bought in several million books from publishers in Latin America to be sold on to the public in national currency.

The legalisation of the dollar in the Caribbean nation, in mid- 1993, spawned a crop of bookshops selling in dollars at prices beyond the pocket of the average Cuban.

The new hard currency bookshops coincided with falling paper imports from the Soviet Union, which reduced the number of books published from 50 million in 1989, to only 1.1 million in 1993.

Omar Gonzalez, head of the Cuban Book Institute said the publications in the fair had been selected to bring the Cuban reader up to date, while offering the opportunity of learning from and dialoguing with other cultures.

There are also 200 national novelties available, including 100 previously unpublished titles, published by the Cuban-Argentinian “Pinos Nuevos.”

This is the biggest literary meeting on the island since the idea first emerged in the eighties, with 52 international companies, 68 local institutions and several international organisms present.

The show is dominated by the most recent Mexican, Venezuelan and Spanish productions.

The organising commission said Mexico had improved on its normal level of representation, presenting a broad display funded by the International Book Fair in Guadalajara and the Independent National University of Mexico (UNAM).

Spain’s ministry of culture, meanwhile, showed the production of more than 110 publishers, as a follow up to the Spanish Book Festival in Cuba, which donated 6,000 books to the national libraries last September.

The exhibition, in smaller premises than in previous years, also offers a demonstration of the possibilities presented to the publishing world by computers, cybernetics and multimedia technology.

However, “this will not be an important event for luxury items or technological breakthroughs,” said Gonzalez, as the stress will be far heavier on the cultural input.

Finally, Gonzalez said the Havana meeting aimed to “encourage cooperative trade relations between the small and medium sized publishers and the big book producers and exhibitors.”