Gabriela Díaz Díaz, a young woman born in Cárdenas, Cuba, received earlier this month from King Felipe VI one of the 100 postgraduate scholarships abroad awarded by the "la Caixa" Foundation in its 44th edition, becoming the only Cuban in the 2025 class.
The ceremony took place at CaixaForum Madrid and brought together the 100 university students selected from 1,101 eligible candidates, in a competitive process that included peer evaluation and personal interviews.
Gabriela, born on January 23, 1999, completed her primary education at Óscar Rodríguez school, her secondary education at ESBU José Martí, and her pre-university studies at IPVCE Carlos Marx, all located in Cárdenas.
After emigrating to Spain, he completed his degree in English Studies at the University of Castilla-La Mancha between 2021 and 2024, where he developed interests in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics.
From November 2024 to June 2025, she was a beneficiary of a Collaboration Grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education, during which she worked with the research group Emotions through Time, Languages, and Cultures (EMOTLC), led by Dr. Javier E. Díaz-Vera.
Her line of research examines how emotional expressions construct identity and, in particular, how "otherness" is articulated through emotional metaphors and metonyms in various cultural and linguistic contexts.
The scholarship covers her tuition for the joint international master's program in Sociolinguistics and Multilingualism, which she is pursuing at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (Lithuania) and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany).
Each scholarship has an average cost of 100,000 euros and includes full tuition, a monthly allowance for living expenses and travel costs, as well as access to a network of over 6,700 professionals from the Foundation's Scholars Association.
During the event, King Felipe VI emphasized the value of the selected individuals: "Your talent and personal skill will be refined and will shape the path," he stated, adding that it was "exciting" to see young people with "a life ahead full of possibilities, full of opportunities" to develop their vocation.
Five of the 100 scholars in this cohort come from non-Iberian countries: Argentina, Cuba, Italy, Lebanon, and Serbia, highlighting the international scope of the program.
The universities with the highest number of scholarship holders are Cambridge (10), Columbia (nine), the London School of Economics and Political Science (eight), ETH Zurich (five), Harvard (five), and Oxford (five).
Since the program began in 1982, the "la Caixa" Foundation has invested over 229 million euros in the international training of 4,177 students, with an investment of 10 million euros specifically allocated for the 2025 call.
Gabriela's case adds to that of other Cuban youth from the diaspora who achieve international academic success, demonstrating that the island's talent flourishes when it finds the opportunities that the dictatorship denies them in their own country.
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