After being welcomed to Paris in 1955 by André Breton and the Surrealists, he became a sculptor of international stature, demonstrating a captivating vital energy, tinged with humour and poetry, in both his drawings and his sculptures in wood, marble and bronze.

He died in February 2001, back in Havana. He left behind him a world of forms plucked from his unconscious, testifying both to the influence of surrealism on his life and to the many cultures to which he was attached. His “horizontal totems”, as he liked to call them, are sensual fragments that address the universal question of our origins.