Books should be read as if each page prolonged our lives and as if the next hour were the last breath, the last verse. With a good coffee in between, with eagerness, alone or in company. There is no solitude where good pages are erected.
Reading a book is like quenching the thirst to learn about beliefs, diverse cultures, to nourish knowledge, to dust off the wings that have fallen asleep due to so much routine, to allow us to travel, to find peace in the storms and to give strength to the stillness, to break mutism and inertia.
It was that need to give birth to more wings and books to Cuba that became a printing press 65 years ago. It was the birth of a majority dream that Fidel made tangible, a history from culture to tell the life of a country from its first pages in Revolution, sealing its foundation on the last day of March 1959.
Alejo Carpentier was the intellectual in charge of that dream called Imprenta Nacional de Cuba. From that magical maelstrom that became a concert in polygraphy, the first printed book saw the light of day. The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, in 4 volumes and a print run of 400,000 copies.
This masterpiece of Spanish literature would be followed by anthologies of renowned poets such as Darío, Vallejo, Neruda and Guillén. The institution’s imprint was to be defining in the primers and manuals that filled the knowledge with the literacy campaign in 1961.
Three years after its birth, it became the National Publishing House, to give way to the Cuban Book Institute, seven years later.
To retrace those pages is to discover a nation in the best of its voices and letters, to know it, is to go beyond a cover and a textual quotation that heads the book, is to scrutinize sources of wisdom and comfort to widen the thinking and light the flame of knowledge.
To read a good book is to find stories, feelings, longings, is to search in hidden corners for other doors, is to fill the soul, the mind, the heart, and to know that you can still find more to give light and roots to Cuban letters.
