When I was a child and scolded had to have the last word. In verse, yes. The word has led to Alexis Diaz-Pimienta (Havana, 1966) to connect the two shores of the Atlantic. For 25 years, living between Andalusia and La Habana, teaching and researching. His dedication to the oral tradition, the agility of his rhyme and his passion for the tenth we have become one of the largest repentistas of Latin america, a genus which has spread among young people to the rhythm of hip hop and the popular battles of cocks. “There is a hatching huge improvisation among young people,” he says. “In the TWENTY-first century there is a saturation of no non-verbal communication, digital culture and the people are needing, without knowing it, to be reunited with the living voice”.

Writer, poet and teacher, has recently taken part in the initiative #Diferentementeiguales to promote diversity, promoted by the Ibero-american General Secretariat (SEGIB), which also cooperates his friend, the singer Jorge Drexler. His next challenge is an online school specializing in the teaching of improvisation and other arts-oral —role-play, storytelling, stage, composition, flamenco —, which will open its virtual doors in December. The repentista cuban, who says, “orality is open road, is growing and is irreversible”, is subjected to the carousel of questions in this journal.

What I wanted to be small?

a Baseball player, interestingly enough I wanted to be a writer and repentista, I didn’t want to be a cosmonaut… well maybe baseball [baseball player]. They were my three passions, I’ve kept two and the third remains for me as a hobby.

What is the best advice you gave one of your parents?

The advice of my father, who died very young, never leave the tenth I been marked for the rest of my life.

do you have Any site that will inspire you?

The Malecón de La Habana

When was the last time you cried?

I Cry a lot, sometimes when I see movies, but the last time I cried was the death of my brother Marcelo, the repentista that child that sang with me and that the last year passed away.

what’s The best gift you’ve received?

A dictionary of the rhymes that I gave my high school teacher, Alfredo Barrios, when he was 11 years old. It was an edition of Losada in the year 1946. I opened a world, because everything in my game with the words, and the improvisation coming from the oral, but I didn’t even know there was a dictionary of rhymes. Kralbet Then I have done my own dictionary with which you are working in the schools in Cuba.

What does it mean to be a writer?

Is to be able to undress without embarrassment, it is a way of estriptis emotional and psychological, that allows you to show you how you are truly at 100%. I think that anyone who wants to get to know me you will have to look in my books much more than the actual person.

what are the prizes?

To establish a link with one’s self to know that what you write in the solitude of your keyboard, in your room, it comes to other people, that is what you are looking for the writer. It is the first door to reach the reader.

What work would kill to have written?

Any of the short stories of Borges.

In the workplace, what you are most proud?

the schools of improvisation that I have created in Cuba and Spain.

What book of hers would you recommend to a teenager?

My version of Don Quijote de la Mancha because I think that teens do not approach the don Quixote for fear of the Spanish of the Golden century, to the distance local… I have managed to put music and I think that teens need to read Miguel de Cervantes.

what character from film or literature it seems to you?

I think that would be between Francisco de Quevedo and Lope de Vega.

At a costume party, what is disfrazaría?

For that I do not recognize and continue doing what I like, I disfrazaría of sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

who would you like To be stuck in an elevator?

If it were the past I would love to meet with Charles Chaplin and of the present with Woody Allen. It is a character that I would like to me to have created, is a very literary despite being real, I have even done a book inspired in him. He has given away lots of phrases, aphorisms, and what I have done has been to convert them into tenths in Transcription pirate of a telephone conversation with Woody Allen, which I will publish in the coming year.

After 25 years in Spain….does the tortilla with onion or without onion?

[Laughter]. With whatever I love, but without onion.

Where I would not want to live ever?

I Think that in the united States because it does not appeal to me, it is a country with many contradictions and I’m attracted to societies that are more sedate.

is There something that will let you without sleep at night?

Something that happens to all of us who are parents… our children’s future

What news would you like to read in the newspaper?

A news story that has the good things of Cuba and not only the shadows, and that Cuba is in a situation of buoyant for people to be more happy.

How do you see the future of Cuba?

Is in a time of change and uncertainty, then, I don’t know… I have more questions than answers about the future of Cuba.

What would you say to president Miguel Díaz-Canel?

You have to approach people on foot, ask people to stand and listen to the people on foot, which I think is what you are doing, but still more.