By Lydia Esther Ochoa lydiaesther@radioangulo.icrt.cu
Music and rain played a good combination to see Faustino Oramas Osorio off two years ago in a burial that congregated thousands of people in Holguín. 
His fellow-men could not believe the Pun King had yielded his crown forever, away from his earthly existence in the kingdom of Cuban idiosyncrasy where guaracha and music, loud laughter and reverences stood up for symbols. 
Several generations kept him company in a non-stop journey while his music goes on being a reason to rejoice, and the lyrics, an alibi to make use of good humor.
Singing with the band "El Guayabero" 
Faustino Oramas did know how to walk life trails when back in the 1930s –he was born in 1912- he was already a young minstrel singing his sorrows and joys at different places in Holguín, even on buses.
He was like an ebony Quixote facing poverty's mills in a society that divided Calixto García park in two, for whites and blacks, while the outcast artist passed his hat for tips among bus passengers living in the city between Jigüe and Marañón rivers.
The Guayabero would tell many years later he took off his hat after ending up singing and say coming close to passengers: “Cooprate with the Cuban artist”, and thus one and another day, until he could push his way through an unjust and unfair world.
When evoking those times he did not do it with grudge. It was joy rather when remembering his first self-taught artist years as a son singer, a street minstrel and a lifetime troubadour, able to overcome fate in the mid 20th century, a lesson of constancy and love for his homeland.
As Faustino Oramas said, “… and then the Cuban Revolution came”; and so did acknowledgement for his work linked to his merit, “… that I did not deserve but receive thankfully. He shared the stage with Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez, Pancho Amat, Eliades Ochoa and other big Cuban artists.
Unveiling his natural size statue at the Provincial Center for the Music and Shows in Holguín.
His home was a meeting place for music goers and singers who could not do without sharing the stage on improvised concerts lasting till dawn, just like his no-end birthday parties, with people stopping by to congratulate him very early in the morning and leaving next day, June 4th, with the sun rise. 
The Pun King, the greatest Cuban Minstrel, the troubadour, the son singer, the Guayabero are Faustino Oramas’ nicknames, who passed away on March 27, 2007, when he was about to turn a hundred years. 
He lived in two different centuries and jumped in the new millennium bringing about a storm of laughter in his natal Holguín, as well as in other towns and cities of 
She showed enough dexterity to follow the rhythm of cyclists in the recently concluded Cuban Cycling Tour, an edition that shed so much bright in medals and sports deeds as in transgressing sexist stereotypes, usually a patriarchy favoring male photojournalism. 
Although she misses sometimes walking light or showing off a little, delicate, acceptable purse, she accepts without exasperation the rigors imposed by the art of photography, not wearing skirts or gowns included.
The professional practice was a self-imposed challenge, a go against the crowd. "I felt excluded in the beginning, mostly by people off mass media milieu. They did not figure out what a woman had to do in such a job. But things changed when I was admitted in the Cuban News Agency at the correspondents' office in Matanzas. I found a lot of support among my colleagues". 
Having turned a deaf ear to prejudices and achieved recognition in a sector with masculine prevalence was not enough to undertake another boldness. With almost 25 years, Marisol Ruiz Soto was able to become the first woman in photographing the Cuban Cycling Tour.
In that list of worth remembered achievements from the 14th Cycling Tour, the feminine performance, a decreasing process, Marisol has been able to implant a fresh start.
The Invitee, presented first in Havana and then in Holguín during the last Cuban International Book Fair, belongs to the Holguín Publishing House’s City Award Prizes Collection. 
Leandro shows, besides a delicious coherence and a peculiar way of dealing with every-day life topics using a critical and diaphanous look, a mastership at writing short stories. 
Leandro said the volume won the City Award Prize under a different tittle –Unconvinced People-; but his editor, Eugenio Marrón, talked him into changing the title. 
“Most of these short stories were conceived during my last years of pre-university studies and during my military service time at Guantánamo Cuban Military Base. It is made up of eight stories that have grown out of difficult circumstances and others that were not so, but that they are there and they have, precisely, to do with people that are not very convinced of the moment that they had to live in.”
