MIAMI, United States. – The Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco assured the voice of america that, when he began to discover Cuba through his parents’ stories, he wanted to know everything about the country.
Blanco was born in Spain in 1968, a few weeks after his parents left the largest of the Antilles.
“I fell in love with Cuba and wanted to know everything about that country. And I have tried to maintain a relationship with the Island, although it is very difficult, ”she explained.
“My memories of Cuba are the stories, the photos, the letters that speak of the family in Cuba, but I know that these are the memories of my parents,” he specified during the recent interview.
“I always say that poetry itself was the one that took me to Cuba, to the Cuba of my parents, and that is why I try to go every five or six years, because it is a very beautiful and interesting experience, and because it is a great inspiration. for me,” he said.
On one of his trips, the Cuban-American poet was able to rediscover his roots: “See the little house where my grandmother lived,” he said, “walk through the same streets that my father walked or see the sugar mill where my grandfather worked, which for Of course it was not the Cuba they left in 1967.”
Blanco was the poet chosen by the former president Barack Obama to read one of his works at the second inauguration of the former president.
In doing so, he became the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, as well as the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person, and, at the time, the youngest person to be America’s inaugural poet.
“The truth is that I don’t know very well how that invitation came to me because I have never asked the president, but I prefer to keep thinking about my romantic version: that his wife (Michelle Obama) was at home, in his library, reading my poems and fell in love with my poems,” she told the Voice of America.
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