Fidel's life and work are a universal compendium of foundations. Nothing that caught his attention escaped his advanced, innovative, rule-breaking genius... revolutionary.
This was true in both the transcendent and the everyday, which—by way of example—is how it was both in the rebellious times of emancipating the Sierra and in those of the visionary intellectual who calculated the possible reach of a book in the nascent digital world.
When professor and senior researcher Carlos Tablada Pérez—president and founder of the digital publishing label RUTH Casa Editorial—was adding up dates and kilometers in 2011 in his "stubbornness" to convince people of the need to introduce e-books in Cuba, NO became a conclusive answer.
Then Fidel found out. With his characteristic humility, the Commander-in-Chief asked if, as a citizen, he would be breaking any laws by converting the books he had written into ebooks.
And so it was that, at the 2013 Havana International Book Fair, and with the help of RUTH Casa Editorial, Cuba presented its first three digital titles to the world: La victoria estratégica (The Strategic Victory), La contraofensiva estratégica (The Strategic Counteroffensive), and La paz en Colombia (Peace in Colombia).
This founding milestone, in which the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution was once again a pioneer, while tearing away the veil of "the impossible and the unthinkable," filled a room at the Fidel Castro Ruz Center with emotion on Tuesday. According to Saray Álvarez Hidalgo, director of the publishing house, more than just a new presentation of those three books—then in epub and interactive pdf format, and now part of a large collection of 39 titles on the Commander in Chief—what took place there was a commemoration of the moment and its main promoter.
"While new economic models were being debated in Cuba, culture did the same: these books by Fidel were Cuba's literary update, proof that innovation was not only an economic concept, but also a cultural one," she said.
In a moving speech, Carlos Tablada Pérez recalled the digital birth of this fundamental trilogy, which he said is part of the "ideological and moral substratum of the Cuban nation" and which, as a whole, "are a manual of resistance, a methodology, a compendium of hope, and a reminder that the essence of Cuba lies in its ability to fight for what is right, guided by the immortal ideas of its best sons and daughters and the example of its leaders."
