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Cuba Book Fair: World of Books
CUBA, February 17, 2009. Book domains are strengthening day by day in Cuba with an International Book Fair that has been following a silver bridge to an infinite universe.
There are other worlds, French Poet Paul Eluard used to say, but they all are within this one.
Beyond figures -178,000 visitors in 72 hours and 25,000 books sold- the key here is devotion to reading, attached to a space that gave life to a tradition that is being enriched year after year.
Cuban book fairs have generated a growing thirst for knowledge, of spiritual craving.
Since 2000, they are no longer an exclusive patrimony of Havana. The prime sponsor of the project was President Fidel Castro. He decided, meeting broad demand, to turn it into nationwide pleasure.
Other projects emerged in 2007: the Summer Reading, the Nights of the Books, and the Nights in Prado (alluding to the famous Prado promenade), immortalized by so many literary works.
Built in 1772, the Prado Promenade draws like an imaginary dividing line at the old city threshold.
Similar proposals were Reading by the Sea, and the latest Reading History, plus the Mountain Book Festivals that like a mountain range, extends from east to west by command of words.
Havana now lives the first phase of this fiesta of knowledge which will be closed in early March in Santiago de Cuba. A short farewell, a truce in which books will keep circulating, making the wait lighter and less nostalgic.
On its fifth day, amen of literary programs, seminars, workshops and new titles on sale at the Morro-Cabana Park, the Fair will honor "the greatest live poet of our language," Fina Garcia Marruz.
That is how Casa de las Americas President Roberto Fernandez Retamar, a poet himself, called her.
A devoted reader herself, in her loa and homage Garcia Marruz called it "sixth sense. If man had not created those symbols, she said, our chests would be more fragile, further beaten by winds. Reading, she stressed, connects us with the world.
It is the invitation to the fair that brings itself each year the secret of its power of seduction, its magic. Multitudinous magic. There are other worlds, said Eluard, but they are within this one. (Cubaminrex - PL)
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