The precision of poetry, thought, aphorism, autobiography, politics, nudity and the self-destruction of a society: with those words one could explain the work of Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930), the Venezuelan poet who has been chosen today Cervantes Prize, the most important of Hispanic letters.

Cadenas is the fifth poet to enter the Cervantes list of winners

after the Uruguayans Ida Vitale and Cristina Peri Rossi, and the Spaniards Joan Margarit and Francisco Brines

.

During the last two decades, the figure of Cadenas has taken on an almost heroic moral weight.

Cadenas decided to stay in Venezuela, choosing an internal exile when the Bolivarian regime was already obviously hostile to writers like him.

Cadenas, who had been a left-wing dissident in Latin America in the 1950s, became the penultimate witness to the dignity of Venezuelan literature.

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