Ediciones Loynaz, the Pinar del Río publishing house that publishes Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Dulce María Loynaz, presents their titles at the Frankfurt International Book Fair (Germany), which is being held from this Wednesday until next Sunday.
The invitation was made possible thanks to a program for small publishers, which benefits some twenty companies from Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. According to event reports which publishes the house on its social networks, the editor Osmany Echevarría Velázquez represented Ediciones Loynaz on October 15 at the program’s introductory seminar.
During the presentation, Echevarría introduced the publisher’s catalog, its distribution processes and its “positioning as part of the Territorial Editions System,” an official network of the Cuban Book Institute in all the island’s provinces.
Echevarría pointed out that, after Hurricane Ian passed through Pinar del Río, where the publishing house is based, the province was “wounded in its soul and its land.” He added that, after the cyclone, “we managed to salvage a selection of print and digital titles.”
The publisher’s booth was visited this Wednesday by the director of the library of the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, Peter Altekrueger, and the director of Acquisition and Cataloging of that institution, Ricarda Musser, who claimed to have 180 volumes of Ediciones Loynaz.
Like other provincial publishing houses, it was born in 1991, during the Special Period, in the midst of the paper shortage and the Cuban economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union.
For Loynaz Editions, the Fair is “a privilege, a recognition” of its three decades of work. Like other provincial publishing houses, it was born in 1991, during the Special Period, in the midst of the paper shortage and the Cuban economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union.
On the island, Luis Enrique Rodríguez Ortega, its director, had guaranteed the official newspaper Granma that the Frankfurt organizing committee invited them as a tribute to their three decades of work, but, even more, as recognition “to the System of Territorial Editions created by Fidel”.
The mention of Castro tried to rid the publisher of any suspicion: it is not the first time that members of Cuban delegations at international fairs take advantage of the trip to leave the country and request international protection.
Granma points out that titles like letter from egyptof the Cervantes Dulce María Loynaz Award, or Tales of Guané, by Nersys Felipe, will be part of the Ediciones Loynaz catalogue. He modestly mentions Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, from Matanzas, whose novels are known worldwide thanks to the Spanish publisher Anagrama.
Echevarría enthusiastically comments that the volume Dangerous writers and other topicsby Gutiérrez, is the jewel of Ediciones Loynaz: “This book shows another side of him, the side of a journalist,” he told the EFE news agency.
Born to spread the work of the Loynaz brothers, despised by the regime along with other republican writers, it remains to be seen if the Pinar del Rio publishing house will resist the temptation of not returning to an Island that is experiencing its most critical moment in decades, after participating in the largest book fair in the world, dedicated this year to Spain.
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