Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Cuban Book Festival Set to Rock Havana

According to Havana’s Granma International:
“To know how to read is to know how to walk. To know how to write is to know how to climb,” a maxim of the Cuban national hero, José Martí.
This is especially salient as the 17th Grand Book Festival gets set to run February 13th to 24th in Havana.
According to Mirtha González Gutiérrez, president of the Cuban Book Congress, the Havana book fair “offers a space for participation by and interchange between all the entities linked to the world of publishing -- authors, publishers, distributors, booksellers, printers, literary agents, multimedia producers, journalists and other professionals -- making it the best place to meet Cuban readers.”

The annual literary event has become one of the most important cultural draws on the island country’s calendar:
The 2007 fair was visited by more than 5,288,000 people who purchased approximately 5,193,000 copies of books across the island.

Given the preeminence of books and the broad participation, the fair has become the country’s premier cultural event. This year, the Cuban Book Institute has announced that more than 8.5 million copies and more than a thousand new titles will be distributed.
The whole piece is interesting, and it’s here.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Walter Lippmann said...

Deutschmannn's anthology is outstanding as a reference tool.

A fine companion would be George Galloway's THE FIDEL CASTRO HANDBOOK, which is filled with photos of the Cuban leader

Cuban society today represents an effort to build an alternative to the way life was under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who ran Cuba before Fidel Castro led a revolution there. No one complained about a lack of human rights and democracy in those days, but U.S. businesses were protected.

Some things work, some don’t. Like any society, Cuba its flaws and contradictions, as well as having solid achievements. No society is perfect. But we can certainly learn a few things from Cuba’s experience. I think we can learn more than a few.

Since August 2000, the CubaNews list, a free Yahoo news group has compiled a wide range of materials, pro and con, about Cuba, its people, politics and culture, and life within the island and affecting it in the Cuban diaspora abroad.

Details on the Yahoo newsgroup:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/

My father and his parents lived in Cuba from 1939 to 1942. They were German Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and not political left-wingers. That family history is where my own interest in Cuba comes from. My dad met my mom in the United States and that's how I came into this world.

Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 2:02:00 AM PST  

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