The official ceremony of raising the flags of Cuba and South Africa, guest of honor at the 33rd edition of the Havana International Book Fair, marks this morning the beginning of the great event, whose doors will be definitively opened in the afternoon, after the opening ceremony, which will take place in the Nicolás Guillén hall of the main venue: the Morro-Cabaña Historic Military Park.
Then, on Friday, at that site and in the 18 sub-sites distributed throughout the capital, the reading public will meet again with ennobling publishing proposals; a purpose that an Island that invests in the book industry, despite a context of economic crisis and the tightening of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the U.S. government against Cuba, will not give up. It is, in essence, the will of a national project that has made culture one of its inalienable priorities.
Juan Rodríguez Cabrera, president of the Cuban Book Institute and of the Fair's Organizing Committee, has affirmed that this is an “extraordinary effort”; a gift, as part of the creative resistance and together with a people who want to be close to art. “It is to challenge the times we live in to offer a collective response.”
