Dignity Award to Graciela Pogolotti on her 88th Anniversary

January 24, 2020

It's normal for someone who receives an Award to feel immensely gratified by their work, but the case that titles this note should be interpreted differently: The Union of Journalists of Cuba is honored to have granted the Prize of Dignity to Graziella Pogolotti. That has just happened.

Knowing her, I know that she receives it gladly and even believing that it is too much, but in this case she is mistaken. It is enough to read her articles each week in the newspapers Juventud Rebelde and Granma to know that we are facing an exceptional personality, in the world of letters and as a human being, expresses the outstanding journalist Marta Rojas in a chronicle published this Friday by the newspaper Granma.

Graziella's education was singular. She naturally learned three languages: French, Italian, and Spanish, which hold no secrets for her. She lived with her parents part of her childhood, adolescence, and youth in Cuba, where she learned our language. Culture is her main sustenance. Marcelo, her father, along with her mother, are the unequaled guides for a person who is not common. I know that I do not offend her by saying that she was prepared to face all the possible difficulties of a creature of superior intelligence and love for life.

That was the first test of dignity that she overcame: her learning, loving what all human beings love. Her teacher was her father, who took her to the great galleries of Europe and Cuba when he had already lost his vision. She was his Lazarillo. She described the paintings and objects that she saw. Graziella has told this, with her smile and her wit in speaking.

When she returned to Paris and studied French Literature, she already had an extraordinary cultural credential; but it was not enough for her. She needed even more to express herself on all the subjects that she saw or felt, and upon her return she studied Journalism at the "Manuel Márquez Sterling" School. Hopefully some Sunday we will read about how much is learned, how much she learned by conversing.

Graziella will know that the Prize of Dignity is perhaps one of the most just that she has received: in full awareness, with a lucidity about which I do not need to write a single word. She is convinced that it is a duty "to try to leave a testimony of the complex era that we are living."