National Radio Prize 2023 for Nersys Felipe and José Gabriel Ramírez Cal

August 17, 2023

Two outstanding figures of our culture deservedly received yesterday the National Radio Prize 2023, awarded by the Institute of Information and Social Communication: the distinguished writer Nersys Felipe, with more than 50 years of work at Radio Guamá station, in Pinar del Río, and the master José Gabriel Ramírez Cal, one of the distinguished voices that has given prestige for more than six decades to the CMHW station, in Villa Clara.

The author of Cuentos de Guane, Román Elé and Maísa, National Literature Prize 2011, and twice Casa de las Américas Prize winner, received around 1970 a request while she was working in radio: "Why don't you write for the children's program?"

Enthusiastically, she conceived stories, and from then on she never stopped writing, and even one of the Havana Book Fairs was dedicated to her, but this writer never forgets the radio medium that has brought her so many professional satisfactions.

For his part, the announcer and screenwriter Ramírez Cal is, as he has been described, "a great professional, a founder, a radio-man." In an invitation made to him for the Mediodía on tv program, he explained that at the CMHW station he developed his entire professional career, and was the creator of distinguished programs such as Olimpiada de éxitos, Todo en música, la Escala musical de verano, La loma del Tamarindo and el Salsómetro. He is considered a "master of generations of announcers and producers."