As the President continues his historic visit to Cuba, American publishers are pressing for the lifting of the decades-old embargo on books and educational materials to the island nation, NPR reports:
More than 50 major players in the U.S. publishing industry are petitioning the White House and Congress to end the Cuba trade embargo as it pertains to books and educational materials.
Calling the book embargo "counter to American ideals of free expression," the petition — endorsed by publishing companies, authors and agents — says "books are catalysts for greater cross-cultural understanding, economic development, free expression, and positive social change."
Calling the book embargo "counter to American ideals of free expression," the petition — endorsed by publishing companies, authors and agents — says "books are catalysts for greater cross-cultural understanding, economic development, free expression, and positive social change."
Publishers Weekly, which ran the petition on the cover of the magazine's March 14 edition, posted it on its website. It says that last month about 40 American publishing industry representatives met with their counterparts in Havana to "build bridges of understanding and explore opportunities for greater cultural and economic collaboration."
The petition also notes that Cuba's adult literacy rate of nearly 100 percent is among the highest in the world. It says there are plenty of commercial opportunities for American and Cuban publishers that could benefit "readers and writers everywhere."
The petition also notes that Cuba's adult literacy rate of nearly 100 percent is among the highest in the world. It says there are plenty of commercial opportunities for American and Cuban publishers that could benefit "readers and writers everywhere."
A petition on The White House’s “We the People” site has also been launched. 100,000 signatures are needed to force an official response.
“The Cuban Embargo, which was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1960, and although the Bernam Amendment of 1988 allows for a very limited and controlled export of books to Cuba, in practice very few books are ever exported, and no Cuban books can be sold in the U.S. Though the embargo can only be truly ended through an act of Congress, it is possible for the White House to lift the ban on books and educational materials”, Bustle.com reports.
Indeed, The Obama Administration opened exemptions in 2015 for Americans to export supplies donated for the purpose of supporting the Cuban people in fields such as science, archaeology and historical preservation. That will facilitate the building of a restoration facility at the home of American writer Ernest Hemingway, outside of Havana. Preservationists have sounded the alarm over the decay of both Hemingway's residence and the papers he left there, for decades.
The folly of the folly of the embargo is illustrated by the project, being funded by a nearly $1 million grant from an American foundation. American touists will be able to travel to see where Hemingway wrote much of his work between 1939 and 1960, but American publishers cannot sell his works there. In fact, the first English-language bookstore in Cuba did not open until 2013, and has relied on donations for its stock- initially, just 300 volumes.
What professors usually have to do when trying to teach a Cuban book is photocopy pages for their students, which puts them in nebulous legal space in terms of copyright and author compensation. Cuban literature has been taught in the US, but because of the trade embargo against Cuba, teachers couldn't order the books for their campus bookstores, so the authors weren't getting compensated when their work was studied. While many authors (or authors' estates) generate significant incomes from steady royalties when schools buy a new round of books every year, Cuban authors couldn't be ordered in bulk.
Additionally, political pressure by Cuban-Americans has meant few works by Cubans in Cuba are taught in US schools, unless they are considered anti-Castro. The supply of these is, necessarily, thin.
The German paper Deutsche Welle has a story up about how close to a million Cubans flocked to the annual Havana International Book Fair, which was held in February. In recent years an average of 1.5 million books have been sold at the fair; the American publishers’ group was granted a booth for the display of 500 titles; a Key West author and an Florida academic press were also granted participation rights.
Chronic shortages of paper and ink for printing- all must be imported- leads to Cuban publishers diverting what they have to the fair. The shortages also contribute to a longstanding bias in Cuban literature toward short stories, novellas and poetry, which use fewer resources.
Foreign publishers make a splash at the fair, however:
At the German pavilion, which is organized by the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Goethe-Institut, this is not an issue. The display is an overview of the current German-language production: The finalists of the German Book Prize, dictionaries and teaching aids, children's books, modern classics, some of the titles that have been given awards for being the most beautiful books.
Spanish translations of contemporary German authors are also available - and all for free. The German exhibitors will leave the books as a gift to readers in Cuba after the fair ends.
It seems odd that, in a clash of ideas, American lawmakers would be keen to see US publishers flood Cuban stores with the best of American thought, especially at a book fair that focuses each year on introducing literature from another country, and hosts a lecture from a visiting author. But Republican majorities in both houses of Congress have insisted they will not consider lifting the embargo any time soon (for an interesting, early, survey of the incidental effects of bans and blockades on publushing see Neuborne & Shapiro, “The Nylon Curtain: America’s Natural Border and the Free Flow of Ideas”, 26 William & Marl Law Review (1985): http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2176&context=wmlr, and Schauer, “Cuban Cigars, Cuban Books, and the Problem of Incidental Restrictions on Communication”, same issue, http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2177&context=wmlr). Foreign publishers hope that resolution stays firm for years to come.
One of the things I regret in my exile from Cuba is that I never got to see any of the wonderful little bookstores along Havana's twin bookseller rows of O'Reilly and Obispo Streets. As a nine-year old the experience would perhaps have been lost on me, but I would certainly recall it as the bibliophile I am today. I have a rare postcard photograph of Obispo Street as it appeared in the 1920s (see below), and in that narrow thoroughfare of glass-fronted stores I think I can make out one of these mysterious shops, though the overhanging placards – which throw large shadows over the street and give it the air of a Moorish bazaar – are unreadable in the evanescent light.
Along this street in 1940 the writer Thomas Merton hunted for books before his conversion to monasticism. In his diary he writes that he saw a secondhand bookstore and walked in, “asking not for St. John of the Cross, but for philosophy books.” There weren’t any, so he walked a little further, and the next store did have a couple of shelves of philosophy: “I had to climb a ladder to look at them. I shouldn't have been surprised to be confronted first of all by none other than Nietzsche.” For the most part, he says, the shelves were full of Spanish and French nineteenth century liberals and radicals.
This would have been a treat to me, as these writers helped influence Jose Marti and his independence movement.
“The next place I went to,” Merton continues, “was Casa Belga, with its big stock of French and English books, and its specialty in pornography and little editions printed in Paris... Henry Miller, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell...and then things like the Philosophy of Nudism. The idea of a philosophy of nudism gave me a laugh somewhat in a quiet, scholarly way...”
Merton entices even while insulting my sense of Cuban identity (“I had forgotten that Cubans and other Latin Americans are suckers for all kinds of sex books” – as if we had cornered the market on pornography). He next describes a bookstore that looked like a bank and didn’t even have books on display on the counters: “Every book in the place was expensively bound and was locked in behind wired doors.”
He continues: “I had given up hunting for St. John of the Cross and was going up the street when I saw a huge place with a great big sign saying La Moderna Poesia (Modern Poetry) which rather astonished me: what a huge shiny bookstore it was. Only when I looked into the window I saw a lot of straw hats...It turns out La Moderna Poesia was a department store.”
Merton is silent after that, so we do not know whether he found St. John in La Moderna Poesia. But in 1984 I had the good fortune to find myself on vacation in Miami, and there on Calle Ocho I discovered the exiled descendant of La Moderna Poesia – another “huge shiny store” but without straw hats in its window. It was very well stocked with both old and new books, as its ancestor must have been.
This diary is one of the scanty sources I have been able to track down for material on the history of books and bookselling in Cuba. My interest parallels the growing interest in Cubana which has made such books extremely scarce and expensive. Among my treasures is Havana: The Portrait of a City, by the 1940s black novelist W. Adolphe Roberts, which contains a chapter on books.
For the record, Roberts identifies the bookstores Merton visited in Havana's booksellers' row as La Moderna Poesia, Swan, and Libreria Cervantes on Obispo, and Casa Belga, Libreria Marti and Libreria Economica on O'Reilly.
Roberts tells us that in Havana of the 1940s large numbers of books were on sale at high prices, the few that were printed locally being relatively the most expensive. “Even secondhand books are dear.” Cuba, he adds, has no book publishers in the proper sense, only printeries which turn out jobs for cash or on terms. This is not surprising in a country beset by three revolutions in almost as many generations; what is a source of pride to me and other Cubans is that quality book publishing has survived through it all, as Roberts records. “Cuba has offered prizes for the best biographies of Jose Marti and other leaders, has issued the works, and has also put out a handsome India paper edition of the complete works of Marti. National annals, assembled by the Academy of History and other agencies, are lavishly preserved in print by the state.”
Evidently there are bibliophilic treasures awaiting the collector of Cubana who, like me, bides his time till the passing of the present regime renders worthwhile a bookhunting expedition to Cuba. This is not the case now, as the government understandably prohibits the exportation of antiquarian and out-of-print books, because of the high cost of paper and printing to replace scarce volumes. While I await that day, I content myself with books such as Printing in Colonial Spanish America (London, 1962), with its interesting chapter on the beginnings of printing in Cuba. There I discovered that printed books in Cuba date back to 1723, when Carlos Habre published Tarifa general de precios de medicina (General Tariff of Medicine Prices, reprinted in facsimile in 1936 by Manuel Beato in La primera obra impresa en Cuba). Important, non-commercial books began to be published in 1736 just after the University of Havana was founded, with the first being a university thesis, Coelestis astrea by Juan Urrea. The bibliophile with a taste for Cubana has nearly 300 years of collecting to catch up with….
Along this street in 1940 the writer Thomas Merton hunted for books before his conversion to monasticism. In his diary he writes that he saw a secondhand bookstore and walked in, “asking not for St. John of the Cross, but for philosophy books.” There weren’t any, so he walked a little further, and the next store did have a couple of shelves of philosophy: “I had to climb a ladder to look at them. I shouldn't have been surprised to be confronted first of all by none other than Nietzsche.” For the most part, he says, the shelves were full of Spanish and French nineteenth century liberals and radicals.
This would have been a treat to me, as these writers helped influence Jose Marti and his independence movement.
“The next place I went to,” Merton continues, “was Casa Belga, with its big stock of French and English books, and its specialty in pornography and little editions printed in Paris... Henry Miller, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell...and then things like the Philosophy of Nudism. The idea of a philosophy of nudism gave me a laugh somewhat in a quiet, scholarly way...”
Merton entices even while insulting my sense of Cuban identity (“I had forgotten that Cubans and other Latin Americans are suckers for all kinds of sex books” – as if we had cornered the market on pornography). He next describes a bookstore that looked like a bank and didn’t even have books on display on the counters: “Every book in the place was expensively bound and was locked in behind wired doors.”
He continues: “I had given up hunting for St. John of the Cross and was going up the street when I saw a huge place with a great big sign saying La Moderna Poesia (Modern Poetry) which rather astonished me: what a huge shiny bookstore it was. Only when I looked into the window I saw a lot of straw hats...It turns out La Moderna Poesia was a department store.”
Merton is silent after that, so we do not know whether he found St. John in La Moderna Poesia. But in 1984 I had the good fortune to find myself on vacation in Miami, and there on Calle Ocho I discovered the exiled descendant of La Moderna Poesia – another “huge shiny store” but without straw hats in its window. It was very well stocked with both old and new books, as its ancestor must have been.
This diary is one of the scanty sources I have been able to track down for material on the history of books and bookselling in Cuba. My interest parallels the growing interest in Cubana which has made such books extremely scarce and expensive. Among my treasures is Havana: The Portrait of a City, by the 1940s black novelist W. Adolphe Roberts, which contains a chapter on books.
For the record, Roberts identifies the bookstores Merton visited in Havana's booksellers' row as La Moderna Poesia, Swan, and Libreria Cervantes on Obispo, and Casa Belga, Libreria Marti and Libreria Economica on O'Reilly.
Roberts tells us that in Havana of the 1940s large numbers of books were on sale at high prices, the few that were printed locally being relatively the most expensive. “Even secondhand books are dear.” Cuba, he adds, has no book publishers in the proper sense, only printeries which turn out jobs for cash or on terms. This is not surprising in a country beset by three revolutions in almost as many generations; what is a source of pride to me and other Cubans is that quality book publishing has survived through it all, as Roberts records. “Cuba has offered prizes for the best biographies of Jose Marti and other leaders, has issued the works, and has also put out a handsome India paper edition of the complete works of Marti. National annals, assembled by the Academy of History and other agencies, are lavishly preserved in print by the state.”
Evidently there are bibliophilic treasures awaiting the collector of Cubana who, like me, bides his time till the passing of the present regime renders worthwhile a bookhunting expedition to Cuba. This is not the case now, as the government understandably prohibits the exportation of antiquarian and out-of-print books, because of the high cost of paper and printing to replace scarce volumes. While I await that day, I content myself with books such as Printing in Colonial Spanish America (London, 1962), with its interesting chapter on the beginnings of printing in Cuba. There I discovered that printed books in Cuba date back to 1723, when Carlos Habre published Tarifa general de precios de medicina (General Tariff of Medicine Prices, reprinted in facsimile in 1936 by Manuel Beato in La primera obra impresa en Cuba). Important, non-commercial books began to be published in 1736 just after the University of Havana was founded, with the first being a university thesis, Coelestis astrea by Juan Urrea. The bibliophile with a taste for Cubana has nearly 300 years of collecting to catch up with….
It’s not easy to find such books anywhere, and especially in Cuba, where the heat and humidity have played havoc with the fragile paper commonly used by cost-conscious bookseller/publishers (publications of the University of Havana, the Academy of Cuban History, and the Ministry of Public Education were printed on better paper, and survive in greater quantity). My own searches have spanned thirty years, during which time I’ve browsed, scavenged, dug out and bartered for a collection now numbering barely 100 Cuban imprints, along with over 400 other books published here and elsewhere before 1959. An excellent source has been Libros Latinos of San Francisco, whose catalogues I’ve studied carefully for decades. Established in 1973, it is the leading purveyor of books and journals from Latin America and the Caribbean, maintaining a stock of over 25,000 titles on a variety of subjects. The owners travel year-round throughout Latin America to purchase new, rare, used and antiquarian books for their large clientele and back order list. Other sources have included local used bookshops, antique malls, antique stores, flea markets, eBay, and the occasional estate sale. Strangely enough, garage sales and thrift stores in the Cuban-American communities of Chicago, such as Logan Square and Lakeview, have yet to yield a single item.
Having maintained a lengthy correspondence with several relatives living in Havana, it naturally occurred to me to ask them to find books for my collection. This proved impossible on many levels: until recently the exporting of books was strictly prohibited by the Castro government. Then, too, copies of older imprints were difficult to find even in the book-rich flea markets of Havana, the Cuban equivalents of London’s old Farringdon Road bookstalls, and whenever found proved to be very expensive. My only success was when a friend of my stepfather visited Cuba and was able to purchase and bring back, by way of Colombia, a very rubbed and nicked but surprisingly crisp copy of Cuban national historian Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez’s La guerra de los 10 años (The Ten-Years’ War), two volumes bound in wraps. This was the 1972 printing of an important work first published in 1950 about the first Cuban war of independence (1868-1878) that failed but which laid the foundation for the successful one of 1895-1898. The covers are reinforced with transparent packing tape, indicating that the books had been read repeatedly. My stepfather’s friend found these treasures in the aforementioned Havana flea market and to this day refuses to tell how much they cost.
In The Blue Guide to Cuba of 1947, that I dug out of an ephemera drawer in an antique mall, I discovered a section on Cuban bookstores and newsstands. The opening paragraph should be of interest to Cuban historians, and I quote it here in full: “Generally considered as one of the leading cultural centers of the New World, Havana has several important book stores, and many foreign visitors have expressed amazement when they discovered that they could find the most sought for books in these... institutions of learning, comparable only in the world’s largest capitals.”
In 1952 Cuba celebrated the centenary of Jose Marti’s birth by engraving his likeness on the coins for that year. It also saw the opening of Libreria Marti at Presidente Zayas 413. An ad appeared in the Blue Guide of 1952 advising readers that “We specialize in old and modern Cuban works” – inviting them to ask for the bookshop’s catalogue. Pre-1959 Cuban ephemera is much sought-after today, especially magazines and catalogues, some of which occasionally turn up on eBay at surprisingly high prices.
For the record, the Blue Guide to Cuba of 1947 lists the most important bookstores of Havana, with their addresses in the Cuban style of including the street name first. Judging from information in the website Cuba Hostels, all except Cervantes have disappeared, caused no doubt by the nationalization of industries and censorship during the early days of the Castro Revolution.
Happily, Mohammed Rauf (see above) also pointed out that he walked into several secondhand bookshops that had not been purged. He also notes that old books are also available in the small bookstalls outside Havana, and, I might add, in Cuban homes , judging from the many interior photographs I have seen in travel books. More recently the Cuban émigré novelist Achy Obejas, currently living in Chicago, has gone on record as saying that her books are now being published in Cuba and sold in bookstores, a sign that the government has relaxed its censorship. According to an interview in the blog Literary Chicago, Obejas is now being described in Cuba as a Cuban writer – not Cuban-American. “For me, there was kind of a perverse pride in that,” she said. Consequently, and because I know well the love of books shared by many of my countrymen, I have faith that when “next year in Cuba” comes, passionate Cubana collectors and bibliophiles will return in force to truly happy book-hunting grounds.
Having maintained a lengthy correspondence with several relatives living in Havana, it naturally occurred to me to ask them to find books for my collection. This proved impossible on many levels: until recently the exporting of books was strictly prohibited by the Castro government. Then, too, copies of older imprints were difficult to find even in the book-rich flea markets of Havana, the Cuban equivalents of London’s old Farringdon Road bookstalls, and whenever found proved to be very expensive. My only success was when a friend of my stepfather visited Cuba and was able to purchase and bring back, by way of Colombia, a very rubbed and nicked but surprisingly crisp copy of Cuban national historian Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez’s La guerra de los 10 años (The Ten-Years’ War), two volumes bound in wraps. This was the 1972 printing of an important work first published in 1950 about the first Cuban war of independence (1868-1878) that failed but which laid the foundation for the successful one of 1895-1898. The covers are reinforced with transparent packing tape, indicating that the books had been read repeatedly. My stepfather’s friend found these treasures in the aforementioned Havana flea market and to this day refuses to tell how much they cost.
In The Blue Guide to Cuba of 1947, that I dug out of an ephemera drawer in an antique mall, I discovered a section on Cuban bookstores and newsstands. The opening paragraph should be of interest to Cuban historians, and I quote it here in full: “Generally considered as one of the leading cultural centers of the New World, Havana has several important book stores, and many foreign visitors have expressed amazement when they discovered that they could find the most sought for books in these... institutions of learning, comparable only in the world’s largest capitals.”
In 1952 Cuba celebrated the centenary of Jose Marti’s birth by engraving his likeness on the coins for that year. It also saw the opening of Libreria Marti at Presidente Zayas 413. An ad appeared in the Blue Guide of 1952 advising readers that “We specialize in old and modern Cuban works” – inviting them to ask for the bookshop’s catalogue. Pre-1959 Cuban ephemera is much sought-after today, especially magazines and catalogues, some of which occasionally turn up on eBay at surprisingly high prices.
For the record, the Blue Guide to Cuba of 1947 lists the most important bookstores of Havana, with their addresses in the Cuban style of including the street name first. Judging from information in the website Cuba Hostels, all except Cervantes have disappeared, caused no doubt by the nationalization of industries and censorship during the early days of the Castro Revolution.
Happily, Mohammed Rauf (see above) also pointed out that he walked into several secondhand bookshops that had not been purged. He also notes that old books are also available in the small bookstalls outside Havana, and, I might add, in Cuban homes , judging from the many interior photographs I have seen in travel books. More recently the Cuban émigré novelist Achy Obejas, currently living in Chicago, has gone on record as saying that her books are now being published in Cuba and sold in bookstores, a sign that the government has relaxed its censorship. According to an interview in the blog Literary Chicago, Obejas is now being described in Cuba as a Cuban writer – not Cuban-American. “For me, there was kind of a perverse pride in that,” she said. Consequently, and because I know well the love of books shared by many of my countrymen, I have faith that when “next year in Cuba” comes, passionate Cubana collectors and bibliophiles will return in force to truly happy book-hunting grounds.
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