The book that Alexis Díaz-Pimienta has written is a new book, in the full sense of the word: almost everything that is said in it, is said for the first time. And although the phenomenon it deals with is not new at all, it is unknown to many, even in the field of culture and scholarship, because there are hardly any bibliographical antecedents, and these, in any case, are very recent. In such a way that Díaz-Pimienta’s book comes to discover an authentic and portentous “new world”, in old times like the ones we live in when cultural discoveries seemed finished.

The improviser is born or made? This question has been on the minds of improvisers, lovers and students of poetic improvisation for centuries. And the answer has almost always been the same: «It is born. “You cannot learn to improvise, because it is an innate gift.” However, the Pimienta Method, with which hundreds of children and young people in Cuba have learned, is an affirmative and contrasted answer to this eternal question. Its creator, the Cuban repentista Alexis Díaz-Pimienta, began at the age of 5 on Cuban radio and television, and has accumulated more than 40 years of repentista experience, more than 25 years of research and more than 15 years of practices teachers in Cuba, Spain and other Latin American countries. This method is completely playful and participatory, effective for learning to improvise in verse, in any strophic form and in several languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Galician and Catalan, fundamentally. All of this… in a brief amount of time. It does not matter if the apprentice starts from scratch or if he has experience and wants to perfect his techniques. Furthermore, the method is designed to learn and also to teach. It includes oral, written, table, playground, blackboard games…