I met Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra through the indispensable approach every young Cuban, during his student life, has with the renowned author of "Don Quixote of La Mancha", iconic character whom along with his friend Sancho Panza, teach us in each reading the nice value of friendship and the importance of caring and respecting people around us.

I want to dedicate my comments of today to him, even though historians and writers have not defined his actual birth, because the period from September 29 to October 9 (1547) has been established to celebrate the birthday of our beloved "One-handed man of Lepanto ".

Surely when getting here, many will think I'm wrong, but the nickname belongs to the writer, who after having participated in the Battle of Lepanto, where he defended the conquests of Spain, also lost the mobility of one of his hands.

Years later that appellative served him as letter of introduction and later became the timbre of his glory.

However, before recognition, his life was nothing but an uninterrupted series of small home and business failures , which include captivity, unjust imprisonment, and public outrage.

Only at the end, after the success of the two parts of Don Quixote, he had certain calmness and was able to enjoy recognition for his work, but he was always overw helmed by monetary hardship.

Miguel de Cervantes was also very adventurous, as the life he chose for his nobleman Don Quixote, whose world mingled fantasy, meditation, discussion and reflection, trying to decipher the guidelines, which at the very end of everything left him with the distaste of poverty and anxiety before power.

If we look at his childhood, we should partially blame his father, who being forced to ply his trade of barber-surgeon in pursuit of a better economy, became the childhood of the small boy into a tireless pilgrimage throughout the most populous Castilian cities.

In this eternal pilgrimage, the family managed to settle in Córdoba in 1553, allowing Cervantes to enter the brand-new College of the Jesuits, where at early age he met the literary world and its representations, deciphering many codes that later were revealed in his works.

He was always fascinated by militaristic clashes. Miguel de Cervantes spent many years of his life between the battlefield and prison, returning to Madrid at the age of 33, after passing through Sicily, Genoa, Rome, Algiers and Denia.

Then, with no options at all, Cervantes decided to retire from his military life by marring Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, who was from Esquivias, a peasant village of La Mancha, where he stayed although he frequently visited Madrid, because it was the only place where he shared with writers of his time, read their works and held a permanent dispute with the renowned writer of Lope de Vega.

Historians conceive that probably at this time, by the year 1604, Cervantes started writing the work Don Quixote, and the novel appeared in Madrid a year later, wining an immediate reputation on readers, although the economic effects were hardly noticed.

Meanwhile, Cervantes continued suffering hardships because not even the success of the novella llowed many advances in hissocial status.

Sinceits presentation, the nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha and his inseparable friend Sancho Panza were legitimized as a tradition on the popular heritage and speech, enrolling the chivalry adventures in the genesis and formation of the modern novel.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died between April 22nd and 23rd, 1616, assisted by his wife and a niece at his home in Madrid, wrapped in his Franciscan habit and with his face uncovered.

The sources of his literary art can be qualified as complex, since on one hand, Don Quixote and Sancho were legitimized as a parody of the errant knights and their squires; but at the same time, they extolled through their actions the fidelity, honour and the fight for the neediest ones. (Daynelis Rodríguez Peña)