Books We’re Not Reading These Days

By Lien Estrada

HAVANA TIMES – While heading back home from the dentist’s office, I decided to go by the center to get a few things done, like buying soap for example. When I got to the sidewalk by the Calixto Garcia park, almost at the corner, I ran into a secondhand book stall. I said hello, and examined with care the books they suggested. Very good ones. If I had the means, I would have bought more than one. In the front row of the display I spotted Frederich Engel’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

I remarked to the bookseller that I should read it, because it’s still a classic. He responded, yes, it’s that. I continued chatting, telling him: when I get this kind of literature for my own bookstand – things like political economy, dictionaries, and socialist philosophy – many customers laugh at me. They say: “But what are you doing still selling this stuff? They say it with an exclamation that seems more like a death sentence via the guillotine – one where you couldn’t possibly appeal for a different sentence.

My colleague answered that the same thing happens to him when he places these books among others of poetry or narrative. Right now, for example: when he put out Esteban’s “Class struggle labor movement,” someone remarked: “it’s going to take you a while to sell that, if you manage to sell it at all.” That comment applies to all the texts on Marxism, Leninism, or those that have to do with political ideology in Cuba. Books that used to be so widely read.

I smiled at him. “Yes, that’s my same experience,” I answered. And continued sharing: “Maybe when our headache is over, we’ll be able to approach them anew, without so much prejudice against this kind of information.”

“Will that day come?” my bookseller friend asked. That moment roused my pastoral spirit. Many times in my life, I’ve even come to doubt it. But one of my principles is to always share hopes, no matter where the sun is coming up. And this is an attitude I want to cultivate until the last moment. Given that, I responded without hesitation: “Of course we will! They’re laws of history itself – birth, development, decadence, and death. No one can do anything to halt that cycle of nature itself.”

I said that from my heart. It wasn’t just for religious, or spiritual principles, or out of solidarity, I also believe it. The human challenge already consists in responding to all these periods and experiencing them maturely – but that’s another issue.

I bought a book of children’s literature by Luis Caisses Sanchez, a now-deceased Holguin writer, very beloved by all. The book is titled, “Zarai and the city of I Don’t Know.”

The bookseller and I said goodbye cordially, as of course we should among colleagues. I wished him a nice day, obviously, and a day when he sold everything.

Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here.