The works of the bookstore that the Mexican publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) plans to inaugurate at the corner of L and 27in Havana’s Vedado, don’t have a time to finish.
This Monday, the premises, where weeks ago a dozen workers could be seen among bricks, bags of cement and sand, was closed and empty. “That does not mean that the work is stopped,” they clarify, by telephone from Mexico, at the FCE, where they also assure that they continue “in the same process, slowly but moving forward.”
The announcement of the new bookstore, which will bear the significant name of Tuxpan, the port of Veracruz from where the yacht sailed Granma, in which he clandestinely returned to Fidel Castro Island in 1956, the director of the Fund himself, the writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, did so on April 20, the opening day of the XXX edition of the Havana Book Fairof which Mexico was a guest country.
In interview with the Spanish agency EFE, Taibo assured that the Tuxpan would be inaugurated at the end of the Fair, the following April 30, without detailing the exact location of the premises. The same day, 14ymedio found that it was actually a renovation and change of name of the Fernando Ortiz bookstorea few meters from the university steps and close to the Habana Libre hotel.
“Two days there is transportation, three days no, three days there is gasoline, four days no, so we have taken it easy. What we want is for it to open”
The employee who then spoke to this newspaper specified, in contrast to what the director of the Fund said, that it would be ready “for the month of May”, something that was confirmed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs two days later. The opening would thus coincide with the official visit to Havana of the Mexican presidentAndrés Manuel López Obrador, between May 7 and 9.
However, days before that trip, the Mexican press reported that the opening of the bookstore was not on the official agenda. It did not materialize, finally, because the rehabilitation works of the property were not finished.
During a visit to the place in those days, another employee in the works indicated to 14ymedio which would surely be by the beginning of June.
Marco Barrera Basols, coordinator of the Fund’s International Outreach, did not want to reveal the budget allocated to the bookstore in Havana, but explained to this newspaper that there had been “slowness in the work.” “Two days there is transportation, three days no, three days there is gasoline, four days no, so we have taken it easy. What we want is for it to open,” the Mexican official said in an audio message the first week of this month. .
Similarly, he explained that the Tuxpan will have a “library” space and a small auditorium and that, in addition, it is conceived “as a work under construction, in process”, as determined with the architects of Understudy, responsible for the design of the bookstore. In other words, its interior is designed to constantly vary, in the manner of “Lego”, with different artistic interventions.
In the words of Barrera Basols, it is “a space conceived as a work of art that is developing and in which, apart from these architects, Mexican artists also intervene.” For this, the Fund has invited the illustrators Rafael Pineda Monero Rape, Ricardo Peláez, Sandra Calvo and Juan Iván González de León.
“We have the same problems and they are natural in Havana due to the petty US blockade to get the materials,” they argued this Monday from the FCE
In the plans sent to 14ymedio, Indeed, there are some of the caricatured portraits that will adorn the walls of Tuxpan, of writers such as José Emilio Pacheco, Sergio Pitol or Rosario Castellanos, and a large conceptual mural.
But, judging by the state in which the works are, the day these works are exhibited and the shelves with books are placed is far away.
“We have the same problems and they are natural in Havana due to the petty US blockade to get the materials,” they argued this Monday from the FCE, while anticipating that the bookstore will not be ready at the end of June either: “After the first delay we had, we did not think of a date. We were very interested in the visit of Andrés Manuel, our president, however we understand the nature of these dynamics on the Island and we are with all the patience in the world doing the work, since we want be a strong and strong and efficient project, and we are in no hurry”.
This Sunday, the newspaper The universal revealed, with a source in the FCE itself, that the estimated amount for Tuxpan it was $10,000, clarifying that “there is no exact amount” due to the problems that the works have presented. when talking to 14ymedio, the Fund confirms that it is “an estimate”. “We do not have an exact figure because construction continues and the works vary their budget as they are executed,” they refer. “It can be more, it can be less.”
Likewise, they assure, contrary to what the Mexican newspaper published, that the construction of the bookstore was not stopped by termites. “The termite was one of the problems that the space had, but this was resolved in February,” they detail.
“We do not have an exact figure because it is still being built and the works vary their budget as they are executed”
The same institutional sources report that the first books destined for sale in Tuxpan, part of the 20,000 sent to the island in a Mexican Navy ship for Mexico’s participation in the FIL in Havana, are kept in a warehouse of the Cuban Book Institute, the organization with which Mexico signed the agreement for the opening of the Fund’s bookstore.
As for the catalog that Tuxpan will offer to the public, in the FCE they say that they will make it known when they believe it is “relevant”, but that “not at all” they have received pressure or vetoes from the Cuban authorities.
The idea of having a foot in Cuba for the great Mexican state publishing house, born in the 1930s at the behest of the liberal historian Daniel Cossío Villegas to provide university students with economics books that were not translated into Spanish, is an old one.
The first attempts date back to the years of President Luis Echeverría, in the 1970s, who, despite publicly defending Fidel Castro, undertook during his mandate the so-called “dirty war” against the guerrilla movements in Mexican territory inspired by the Cubans.
Those negotiations were not very successful, although in the last months of the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988), what was known as Casa de México was created in Old Havana.
The last attempt was during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, predecessor of López Obrador, in the last months of the thaw initiated by US President Barack Obama. Also, unsuccessful, because, on the one hand, running a bookstore in Havana was not profitable and, on the other, the Island always made it a strict condition to supervise the titles that were imported.
“The Revolution has the right to defend itself,” then the high-ranking Cuban officials used before their Mexican counterparts.
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