Cover of Aventuras de Raflo y Raúl alrededor del Mundo, over a 1914 map of Cuba

Flora Basulto de Montoya

Aventuras de Raflo y Raúl alrededor del Mundo

Volumes I – II

Camagüey · 1928

A 2026 commemorative edition, newly typeset from the only known copy of the first edition, kept by the family for nearly a century.

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Printed edition

The book can also be ordered as a bound copy: a 6 × 9 inch (15.2 × 22.9 cm) hardcover, 643 pages, in red linen cloth with a gold-stamped spine and a dust jacket.

It is printed on demand through Lulu, an online service that prints and ships each copy at the moment it is ordered. Each one is paid at the cost of printing and shipping. Your purchase generates no profit.

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Oval portrait of Flora Basulto de Montoya, with her signature below
Flora Basulto de Montoya

A note on this edition

Aventuras de Raflo y Raúl alrededor del Mundo was first published in Camagüey, Cuba, in 1928. Its author, Flora Basulto de Montoya, wrote in her preface that the book was composed for her own children, in her triple role of mother, mentor, and writer.

After the revolution in 1959, the daughter of the author, Elida Montoya de Pérez-Reinaldo, brought the only surviving copy to the United States. Her son, Ricardo Pérez-Reinaldo, kept the book for many years. In 2026 he loaned it to his cousin Rolando Montoya, Flora’s grandson, who decided that his grandmother’s book should not remain a single fragile copy.

Nearly one hundred years after Flora Basulto de Montoya wrote this book for her children, her grandson returns it to print for the generations that follow.

How this edition was made

From the single 1928 copy to a new book, in four steps.

  1. I

    Photography

    Every page of the original was photographed one by one: 661 photographs in all, including the boards, the endpapers and the plate with the author’s portrait. Those photographs are the basis for everything that followed in order to best preserve the 1928 original.

    • The 1928 binding
    • Page 13, as photographed

  2. II

    AI transcription

    Two different AI systems read each photograph independently. The two readings were then compared word by word, and every disagreement was flagged for a person to make the final call by looking at the photo. Of 618 pages of text, 156 came out identical and 460 had at least one discrepancy: 1,358 in all.

    Reading A
    “¡Camagüey!”,
    Reading B
    “¡Camagüey”!,
    Page 12: one reading put the exclamation mark inside the quotation marks, the other outside; the photograph shows the second.

  3. III

    Correction by hand

    Rolando checked the transcription against the photographs, line by line, in a review site built for this book: the photo on one side, the text on the other, and each discrepancy marked in place. It took him several weeks. The text keeps the spelling and punctuation of 1928 exactly as Flora wrote them, including the forms that look odd today.

    618
    pages approved
    460
    pages checked against the photo
    1,358
    discrepancies settled

  4. IV

    Typesetting for print

    With the text settled, the book was typeset afresh in 10.5 point Hoefler Text at 6 × 9 inches: both volumes, the plate and a short note on this edition, 643 pages. Before printing, every typeset page was automatically compared with the approved text to confirm that not a word was missing or added.

    • 1928
    • 2026
    The same page, in the original and in the new edition