An accomplice and touching meeting took place as part of the tributes paid by Las Tunas to Pablo Armando Fernandez's 95th birthday. The atmosphere combined music, painting, and lyrics, a blessed broth for anecdotes and nostalgia to emerge.

Las Tunas, Cuba.- The youngest of his daughters, Bárbara Fernández, a special guest to this Fair, discovered for those present a very loving father, essentially homely, and delighted us with his more than 50 years of marriage with Maruja, the muse that anchored him to the ground when his head of verses made him fly over life; and she unveiled a theosophical man viscerally committed to art.

She said, “He lived in Havana, but he never felt he was from there. He was from Delicias and New York, the cradles of his childhood and adolescence”. She was moved to tears when she was shown the painting of her father that presides, from now on, over the headquarters of the Center for Literary Promotion that bears his name.

Bárbara donated books, and photos and thanked Las Tunas for the respect and commitment to the work of her father, whom she cared for until her last breath, the same one who as a child went to pick her up from school, and even stood in line with her to buy “with those coupon books. And he spent his time talking to everyone because he loved being around people; he was a great conversationalist and a very approachable, colloquial person."

Ena Vidal, that august daughter of Las Tunas, told how she knew him in her childhood, of Pablo's taste for theater, dancing, and the most honest and folksy joy. She said that his name is, along with others of his lineage, in the genesis of ProArte, the cultural project born in these lands, and that today is, like so many things, a kind of oblivion, a stale grimace, a pending debt.

Carlos Tamayo, with that “bad habit of looking for things” (in his own words), brought poems to the meeting, told of the pleasure of visiting the poet's Havana house on two occasions and how the walls were covered with art, in its maximum expression, even recalling the unique pleasure of finding an authentic Picasso among his paintings.

It was said that Pablo bought his own books, once they were published, signed them, and distributed them to the embassies so that copies could reach his friends in other latitudes “and thus break the blockade." Anecdotes of his time-proof sensitivity and the immense legacy he leaves in these lands were also highlighted.

Undoubtedly, a distinctive day within these days of the Fair, one that highlighted the taste for what is ours from the voice of a man whose presence beats here but also haunts multiple latitudes.