The young Armando López Carralero won the second edition of the Prosa de Prisa review competition (Rushed Prose), organized by the provincial branch of the Nicolás Guillén Foundation, with La guagua de Babel o motivos para un viaje (Babel's bus or reasons for a journey), an analysis inspired by the collection of poems with which his fellow countryman Carlos Esquivel Guerra won the Nicolás Guillén National Poetry Prize 2023.

Las Tunas, Cuba.- This was the first time that Mandy - as he is known- participated in this competition and, like the name of the contest, he wrote the review the day before it closed. “I enjoyed writing it. When you approach this genre, you have a lot of fun…you learn… you get into the writer's world,” he confessed to 26.

So, was it difficult to travel to La Guagua de Babel?

“Yes, it was but I liked the challenge. This is a book where the lyrical subject travels to different areas, exchanges with various cultures, and visits unexpected places; but always returns home, to his country.” It is precisely with the fragment “This is the “novel of no things, of no journeys,” that Carralero begins his review, in clear reminiscence of the book he wisely breaks down.

Mandy begins by noting the incongruence between the term novel (explicit in the first poem of La Guagua...) and the genre that qualifies that work: poetry. He also recognizes the coincidental sarcasm in the fact that Babel is a word of Hebrew origin, and traps us with a series of questions such as: Can Carlos start a bus just by announcing the journey? What would be the destination of this bus? He does not fail to recognize traits such as portentous maturity and a plausible evolution in the work of the author of Zona Negra, Los Hijos de Kamikaze, Cuarteaduras, and other books, also transgressive.

“Carlos travels, plays, celebrates, immerses himself in other cultures, visits cities: Tampa, Houston, Mexico, Madrid, Pennsylvania, but always returns (at least that's what he has led us to believe) to the old, destroyed, perhaps invisible house,” the young man points out in his review.

Aware of the power of this genre to unravel issues already raised (but sometimes unintelligible to the reader), Carralero dives into the intertexts of La Guagua de Babel, and even classifies the author in this work as a reflective poet "because he makes us think while at the same time forcing us to meditate, to discover or try to discover, the exact place of peace..."

Certainly, as his review states (and further demonstrates), "literature sometimes serves to show the real maps, the perfect palmistry’. Moreover, there is a subjective world behind the word, to be discovered or interpreted." And that is what Mandy - who also simulates a reflective poet - achieves, because ‘it is enough just to announce the journey (...), there will always be a reason to travel." Let's get on The Babel Bus.