Cuba Book Fair 2016 in Full Swing
Photo Feature by Juan Suarez
HAVANA TIMES — The latest edition of the popular Cuba International Book Fair is underway in Havana through February 21. Here are some pictures taken on Friday, the opening day to the public.
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Most of the books I saw were much more than that. $8-10CUC was more the norm, some even more than that. And like I said, people were buying a lot of them.
The bitter irony of holding a book fair in La Cabana – El Morro complex always amazes me. La Cabana is the very place where that sociopathic book-burner, Che Guevara, executed hundreds of Cubans in the months following the fall of Batista. El Morro was for many years a prison, and where the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas was jailed. Do you suppose any of his books are available at the fair?
I notice in one of the photos, the price of 3 CUC for books. That’s 3 days salary for the average Cuban. Clearly, this book fair is not marketed to average Cubans.
It always amazes me how popular this book fair is. I accidentally got “trapped” in the middle of it in 2010 when I was trying to see the Morro Castle. This was one of the largest crowds of people that I’d ever seen, and people were buying a lot of books at prices that really weren’t that great.