Word and identity were for me a patience and difficult conquest. I immersed in the Castilian through ear, by osmosis with the noises that came from the neighbourhood, the town crier's voices, the neighbourhood’s chatter, pieces of novels, the visitors’ conversations, children rounds in the near park. Meanwhile, she continued reading in French - language to read at home - poetry, stories of Perrault and Andersen, the countess's of Ségur novels. I was fascinated with the bloody camera of Blue Beard.

Thus, I have been identified with the country, island that would be a definitive port. The history, and a happened event in the frontier of Poland, had broken the green paradise of the children loves. Since then, I knew that I couldn’t live out there and I learned geography following the passage of the battles in the distant Europe, there, my old game partners continued living and, in some cases, they would die fighting for it.

Fernando Ortiz and José Lezama Lima, each one in their moment, recommended that I should do the specialization and discover a reef to arrive until the deepest in its root, paradoxical advice from those who want to adventure on ecumenical knowledge. Maybe, I had followed the advice, because I loved it after all, but my curiosity for the present is urgent and infinite, stimulated by the search of the interconnections between life and poetry, between art and literature.

The island is a port, a refuge and, at the same time, a fragile thread, key of the new world, ante mural of the western Indies, unlimited between the Atlantic and the Caribbean, shaken by the winds of the north and the hurricanes of the south. Culture and nation have been born within the permanent dialogue between the people around the world, between the splendour of the Marti’s image about the earth and the on look in the roads of the sea, books carriers and modernized restlessness, unavoidable or voluntary immigrants' wish, object of the desire of pirates and colonial powers, involved for that reason in global conflicts that overflow the small dimension. Above "the damned circumstance", the letters and the arts have interwoven a successful dialogue with the rest of the planet. We have grown up in a stimulating cultural cannibalism.

My personal biography is inseparable of my intellectual trajectory. I continue thinking that La cartuja of Stendhal will be with me when I’ll take a rest in some solitary corner. Because Parma is everywhere, built by Arrigo Beyle, almost on the eve of his death, on his experience of life and reading, on his vision of the landscape and the art of Italy, in spite of everything, he had to observe as Fabricio the battle of Waterloo from the margins, always between the passion and the lucidity.
(...)

I have never stopped to contemplate in a mirror. I don’t like either to return the glance backwards. I take a good look at myself and that confirm every night under the immediate present. The Award that today I received, demands to stop and to do, for the first time, a retrospective. Of this reflection will view and I hope that, a new point to begin. I must return on my own prints with the rescue of infinity and dispersed works and feels the necessity to finish them, at best outlined. Because, for me, do something is, above all, the best way to exist.

I thank everybody, those that have been with me year in and year out, who nominated my work and the jury who granted the prize to me and You, all those present, to be with me today's afternoon.