He presents Coca Cola with the challenge of creating what would be the largest mural with discarded Coca Cola caps. “That’s art.” “It’s not that I am crazier than others,” he candidly admits.

In most of his works, he promotes recycling. “It was junk until it got to my workshop,” he explains. Other materials he has used include the base of a discarded fan and a metal freezer he found off the shore. “The Malecon is an excellent source of useful garbage,” he remarks.

“These are wastes that when looked at closely, as if through a magnifying glass, show rhythms and intensities of a kind that our eyesight would not have captured until now,” he says.

“Here what there is most of is garbage; but nobody has told the new generations of artists that they can live from that if they turn the junk into art,” he points out.

He tells the new generations that they should learn to live with the resources they have. He points out that he lives from his art, but cautions that it “is not to have a [Toyota] Lexus.” He says that he gave up making a living from commercial photography to dedicate himself to creating unique works of art. Ramon Pena designs and later conceives his works that will undergo transformations as the work advances. These are exclusive works; the work he sells to one person, another will not have.

But what motivates him most is his work to open spaces for more cultural expression in small towns. “The country is limiting itself. It is easier to copy than to create,” he complains. He considers, nevertheless, that there is an abundant supply of talent in the country.

That was what motivated him to work as a volunteer in Expo Mundo Cultural Puerto Plata 2005, a cultural event organized by the Association of Hotels of Playa Dorada, where he worked as coordinator of the international and national exhibition of sculpture, ceramics and handicrafts because it was an opportunity to showcase a selection of local talent alongside international talents.

He worked with his own vision of museography, coordinating an arts event held at the Casa de Cultura in the town center. He used his knowledge to gather a selection of several of Puerto Plata’s most promising new artists. He continues to accept challenges. The challenges feed him day by day. For Ramon Pena, works of art need be “poetry that is hung up” and he strives for his works to have a literary basis by writing what these are about before starting. He is a talented writer, with 39 awards from the literary contests organized by the local Sociedad Cultural Renovacion. “One has to put heart in what one’s hands create,” he says, and that same heart has led him to be part of the organization of the first Puerto Plata national arts contest, following in the footsteps of the successful biennials of Santiago and Bonao.

At the moment, as part of his work as a cultural promoter, he is working on the Triennial of the Atlantic, to take place in Puerto Plata in 2006. He explains that participation will be by invitation. They will pre-select and invite 20 artists who will work simultaneously.