Books Star on a Cuban Summer Night

By Irina Echarry, photos: Caridad

HAVANA TIMES, July 5 – Although it’s known that any time is a good time for reading, the Cuban Book Institute for the third time organized a special “Book Night” an event that kicked off the summer season in Havana on Friday.

This year books from 17 publishing houses were for sale, available to all those who ventured along 23rd Street in the downtown Vedado district.

Poetry, children’s books, fiction, history, social sciences…they were all there.

People walked all along the street looking for different reading selections, exchanges with authors, book presentations, comedy routines, performances by the children’s musical-theater company La Colmenita, or the playing of some trova musician.

The Strawberry and Chocolate Cultural Center welcomed writers wanting to be heard.  One by one they read passages of their works, while blocks down the street thousands of girls and boys hurried their parents to get to the Coppelia ice cream park for a taste of its flavorful deserts.

Six in the afternoon was an opportunity to meet the players on the Havana Province baseball team (this year’s national champion). The public mobbed them, with adults and children alike begging for their autographs or simply a chance to have a photo taken with them.

At the end of the night, around eleven o’clock in the Mariana Grajales Park, singer-songwriter Raul Torres delighted the crowd with his music and lyrics, the intense heat of the afternoon had passed, so the chords of his music now reigned with the stars.

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