A magistrate who prosecuted him declared that "his strange life is truly an extraordinary novel." And then, his exceptional career had barely begun: he was a renovator of education, a liberal revolutionary, and a fighter for the independence of the American colonies, to the point of being proclaimed president of a proposed republic of Texas. Two centuries after his death in Cuba, in the first days of September 1825, we remember Joan Picornell, who declared that "ignorance is the greatest evil of a people."