Freedom, democracy and literature have merged in the discourse with which the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930), author of such celebrated poems as Defeat, has collected the Cervantes prize from the hands of the Kings in the auditorium of the University of Alcala de Henares. The 93-year-old writer, who has crossed the Atlantic to collect the most important award for letters in Spanish, has not directly attacked the Nicolás Maduro regime, although he has recalled the massive migration from his country and has indicated with relief that the Central University from Venezuela, where for so many decades he was a teacher, “despite not being well for years, he continues to be plural.”

However, he has pointed out that totalitarianism is advancing in the world and has made an urgent call to defend democracy, renew it and recreate it, and also “the foundations of all culture”. He has done so in a speech interwoven with the two great characters of Cervantes in which he has vindicated Sancho Panza, “who represents reality” and instead has warned that “the imprint of Don Quixote was on the believers of the utopia that would fix everything And it ended in disappointment.”

If in his speech Felipe VI praised the writer, pointing out that “Rafael Cadenas is the work of a great modern poet, who does not want style but honesty” and that “requires uprightness and integrity in acting”, Cadenas has used to Seneca, Orwell, Goethe, and of course the author of Don Quixote –“Cervantes was a great defender of freedom”-, to ask for cosmopolitanism and democracy, whose poor state, he has pointed out, is related to the poor state of the language.

“It is known that nationalisms, ideologies and creeds divide human beings, but at this time, the world, thanks to the development of communication, should be cosmopolitan; In a certain way it already is, but the factors that I have mentioned oppose it, especially nationalism, which according to Einstein is the measles of humanity ”, he pointed out. And he has launched that he believes that “the time may have come to review the bases of the entire culture, although I do not know if saying this is a contagion of the two famous characters. Everything should be examined, seen, exchange the illusion for the real, the most arduous task that has to be asked of the human being.

He has precisely pointed out that “in my opinion, Sancho Panza has been underestimated by the quixotists, he represents the real, and probably our time will enhance it, since we are witnessing a revaluation of ordinary life, and it is that mystery is also in it. “Reality is stranger than fiction,” said Walt Whitman.

And continuing with the idea of ​​revision, Cadenas, who was forced into exile for four years in 1954 for protests against the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, has said that this revision “should also be applied to democracy.” “It is urgent to defend it from everything that stalks it and for this it is necessary to recreate it. That task falls to education, which has neglected it. The Democrats must call out for its renewal. It must be internalized, become transparent, give primacy to the social, abolishing poverty, supporting culture. This is not a dream, but a job for everyone, to be done only with full freedom”.

A freedom for which it is necessary to also repair “our language, which is very battered”. “I can’t point out its flaws, this time, because there are too many of them, some coming from translations from English on TV and other media.” And, he continued, Orwell already said that “the current political chaos is related to the decline of language and… we could achieve some improvement if we started with the verbal”.

In this sense, the Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, who has started the speeches of a ceremony that Pedro Sánchez has not attended – which has deserved criticism in the middle of the pre-campaign of the regional president, Isabel Ayuso, who has been in the act-, wanted to quote some of the poet’s reflections: “Language is inseparable from the world of man. More than the field of linguistics, it belongs to that of the spirit and the soul.

Iceta has also recalled that in Ars poetica, the last poem in his book Intemperie, it reads: “May each word carry what it says. Let it be like the trembling that sustains it. To remain like a heartbeat”. And that Cadenas has been committed to “the fullness of reality”, recalling one of his powerful quotes: “I have eyes, not points of view”.

Cadenas concluded by citing the freedom that Cervantes staunchly defended: “I will remember his well-known words, although they should be more widely known: ‘Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven gave men; with her cannot be matched the treasures that the earth encloses nor the sea conceals; Life can and should be risked for freedom, as well as for honor, and, on the contrary, captivity is the greatest evil that can come to a man’”.