Havana/A book by the Cuban ethnologist Lydia Cabrera appeared this Friday in the official Table Round program. The silence of the guests about the copy, one of the novelties of the International Book Fair, was only broken by Randy Alonso with a surprise comment. None of his interlocutors, however, dared to answer what the work of an author exiled in 1961 was doing there and banned by the cultural commissioners of Fidel Castro.
The title in question is Black Tales of Cubaan anthology of Afro -Cuban legends published for the first time on the island in 1940. Because it is a book halfway between fiction and anthropology – and because other author’s classics, such as The mountain, already edited during their banishment. The program chamber also avoids focusing the volume cover.
This was not the only surprise of a round table dedicated to the increasingly off “Cuban book party”. The president of the Institute, Juan Rodríguez, turned the program into a rosary of complaints and economic details – such as payment to foreign authors or the participation of some SMEs – to start the event.
“The only great novel that still has rights in Cuba” by José Saramago is ‘Essay on blindness’
The Institute must pay foreign writers what the sale of their books collects in Cuba in dollars and “at the change of that moment,” Rodríguez revealed. “We talk to all the authors, we explain what the book is in Cuba, they are tried to reduce the profits to the indispensable minimum but the foreigner always comes in that condition.”
“They sell in the national currency to the Cuban citizen but then the State has the obligation to, how is the change, foster the transfer in hard currency,” he added. The Institute enjoyed a little budget for the event – he did not say how much – because the decision to allocate money for the fair is taken “at the same table” as other “more important” decisions, such as the “development of the country.”
“The only great novel that still has rights in Cuba” by José Saramago, “kindly ceded” years ago because his translation is national, is Essay on blindness. The Portuguese Nobel broke with the Cuban regime in 2003 after the executions of the three young people who took the rule boat and denounced the imprisonment of 75 opponents and independent journalists during the so -called black spring.
“Every day is more difficult,” Rodríguez said. If the fair is done, it is because “the State has backed it” and it is “a state gift to the people.” The event, dedicated to South Africa and “Fidel”, will have a modest offer: 2,400,000 copies and 1,200 novelties, mostly digital, he acknowledged. Alonso said that a large part of those books are not even recently edition, but were “in the stores.”
“The great novelty is the people’s library,” Rodríguez said. This is a project designed by the critic Ambrosio Fornet and the painter Raúl Martínez who published economic editions of Cuban authors such as José Lezama Lima, Eliseo Diego, Nersys Felipe or Cabrera herself, and others, universal classics, such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Rodríguez said he had invited several SMEs “related to knowledge products”
Rodríguez said that several SMEs had been invited – to which he did not call that name – “related to knowledge products”, but that they were demanded “so that the fair does not distort.” He did not give more details. Josué Pérez, coordinator of the Fair, added that the event will have a business forum from which he also said nothing concrete.
The Fair will be held from February 12 to 23 in two main venues: the colonial strengths of Morro and La Cabaña, and several premises in Havana. The historian Francisca López Civeira and the writer Virgilio López Lemus will be dedicated to historian.
On the choice of South Africa as a guest, Rodríguez said that there was “a debt” with the African country to reinforce relations with a nation that “practically produces 25% of the gross domestic product of Africa.”
“They see it as a great gift to express their culture,” he added. According to the manager, there will be books by Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize for South African Literature supporter of the Cuban regime. Rodríguez did not say if works by the other South African literature, the well -known novelist JM Coetzee, published in Spanish, the Random House publisher.
