The promotion of books and reading, a passion to which Commander in Chief Fidel Castro dedicated so much effort, constitutes an unalterable commitment of the Government, Cuban cultural institutions and the artistic and literary avant-garde.
That priority, and the way to make it effective in the midst of current circumstances and for the immediate future, set the tone for the most recent meeting between the President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, the member of the Party Secretariat, Víctor Gaute, directors of the Ministry of Culture and prominent creators, who followed up on the agreements and proposals of the IX Congress of Uneac.
If the epidemiological emergency prevented the holding of the International Book Fair this year, and cut off the program of the previous one throughout the country, the writers, editors and promoters, summoned by the Cuban Book Institute (ICL), Uneac, the Hermanos Saíz Association and the institutions of Culture are preparing to celebrate, from March 26 to 31, a day for Cuban Book Day, commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the National Printing Office.
They will do so through literary presentations, conferences, panels, interviews, documentaries and exhibitions, with the accompaniment of cinema, music and the visual and performing arts, mostly conceived for their dissemination in virtual spaces.
If even before the pandemic the printing of books and magazines fell significantly, due to the onerous effects of the US blockade against Cuba, the country’s top leadership is making enormous efforts to update the delays in polygraphic production and improve the equipment of the system of territorial editions created by Fidel.
Neither the Writers Association nor the ICL have stopped working and, in many cases, finding solutions that provide answers to the agreements of the IX Congress. However, there are pending tasks and questions that go through, from the stimulation of creation to the essential role of criticism in the establishment of hierarchies, which must be assumed with intelligence, integrity and an innovative spirit.
It is urgent, according to the poet Miguel Barnet, to know with certainty what is written today, what the Cuban of our time reads and wants to read, what is the relationship of young people with reading, to ventilate if we have known how to tell our story in letters. It is necessary, said the narrator Francisco López Sacha, to take the real pulse of the current state of literary creation, since there is a risk of insubstantial relativization or atomization of perspectives, as has happened in Western countries with a long tradition. It is urgent to recover the edition and circulation of emblematic magazines and dignify the role of the literary translator, according to the poet Nancy Morejón. The narrator Laidi Fernández de Juan made justified claims about the representation and protection of Cuban authors. The historian Ernesto Limia insisted on the factual and permanent alliance between the best literary references and the educational system.
After requiring a greater intensity in the response to these and other problems addressed, the president became interested in the basic collection of Cuban authors in the implementation phase, and emphasized the need to promote reading: “If we achieve that people read more, we would contribute to making them better people, better citizens.
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