Two of these beautiful planets have now been visible together in the Miami sky. Evelyn Sosa has just been nominated for the 2026 CINTAS Fellowship in Photography, one of the longest-established distinctions devoted to Cuban and Cuban-descended creators. Leticia Sánchez Toledo, meanwhile, has been awarded a grant through the Miami-Dade Individual Artists (MIA) Grant Program, administered by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs with the support of the Mayor’s Office, the Board of County Commissioners, and the Cultural Affairs Council.

Beneath all this lies a precise mathematics, of course, one that would allow us to retrace, in reverse, the shared reasons behind this simultaneous recognition. Mathematics and I keep our distance. Mysticism and poetry will get you there too, though theirs is a journey of faith.

For a relatively short time now, Leticia has been making portraits of those whom, if she ever insisted on thinking about it, she might call kindred souls, or sensitive souls, or better yet, “rare flowers in the Cuban spiritual garden.” Among them, of course, is Evelyn Sosa.

I have had the rare privilege of accompanying, from their beginnings, the steady ascent and quiet but firm consolidation of both careers. And I still think this is only the beginning of something much larger.

This portrait of Evelyn is a very true and accurate one, through that adventurous courtesy of showing herself exactly as she wishes to see herself. Far less dramatic than in one of her own self-portraits. The painting contains hundreds of tiny details and clues that draw a reliable map of the hermetic territory that is Evelyn Sosa. Like the seldom-conquered summit of an Andean peak, she is always wrapped in dense cloud. Her surroundings, however, reveal themselves under clearer skies, and from them emerges a fairly precise map of her personality. I have no desire whatsoever to tell anyone, as though I knew, who Evelyn is. Let everyone read and interpret her for themselves. Good luck with that.

Leticia, as always, makes a study, sometimes more than one, and once she is certain she has found the exact way to say it, she takes it to the canvas. She does so with tremendous assurance. The result never exhausts itself, never bores, and seems to have been there when the world cooled. As natural as ceiling lamps or electrical outlets.

Unlike celestial bodies subjected to a predictable orbit, Evelyn revolves around two or three governing suns. Photography and cats and something else. To focus Evelyn’s attention, Leticia chooses one of the cats and reading. She leaves the camera out, though not very far away. Perhaps she sees it as an instrument of affective return. An interface through which to send back into the cosmos the light she receives from the sun, from cats, from literature, and from the sinuous contours of spectral flesh.

Without having very much I want to say, it makes me happy and gives me comfort to watch my friends grow and flourish like rosebushes. And for the record, of all flowers, roses are quite far from the ones I think would best represent them. One of the few good things about the passage of time is this. You watch effort turn into fruit, and you watch artistic practice become a reflex action, something that can be done while thinking about something else, because it has been mastered. The colt of art still rears sometimes, but with each passing day it recognizes its rider more readily.

I congratulate them with this text.