For Cubans, it is a joy and honor to have the illustrious writer Dulce María Loynaz as a compatriot . With her what happens to us as with the greats: time passes and her work grows, time passes and her presence is entrenched in memory, time passes and Dulce María continues to cling to the readers' preference.

It is now 24 years since her physical departure, and the poet is increasingly revealed to us in other aspects of her literary work. Dulce María was an accomplished journalist, an elegant prose writer, and had a life so full of extraordinary episodes that knowing some of them becomes an exercise for the intellect.

Everything about her is of interest to her devoted admirers. Without intending it, and surely oblivious to it, a legend of loneliness, isolation and elegance was woven around her personality, all true, that the distinguished poet, already in her high years, was gradually unveiling in a few interviews and in her memoirs, Life certificate , first published in 1995.

To Aldo Martínez Malo, the diligent researcher from Pinar del Río (now deceased) who with admiration and respect penetrated his family privacy, made these confessions in 1993:

I met my first love through a telephone wire, through an unknown voice that came through that wire and that would eventually become the "ghost of my ear." It still remains so when the mouth that articulated it has already melted under the ground. I was then 17 years old and it was not easy to get to me. I was always very guarded because my people thought that only misfortunes could befall me from dealing with the world. But I must clarify something that not everyone knows: although Pablo Álvarez de Cañas was my first love and my first boyfriend, he was not, however, my first husband. Many years after meeting him, fighting in vain with the terrible opposition of my family (…), many years, in short, after saying goodbye to him (I believed forever), I married my cousin Enrique de Quesada Loynaz. This marriage only meant a change of closure, which after all did not matter much to me, because I have always believed that I would have made a good nun. Not the ones who play tennis and drive cars now, but the old ones. I am still going to add, perhaps to the surprise of many, that those seven years that my marriage and my seclusion lasted in a beautiful colonial farm called La Belinda (located on the outskirts of Havana), in the midst of great peace and in full contact with nature, they were seven perfect years. They were until one day I realized that I was getting old, that I had always lived for others and had written many things that nobody read and I still did not know if I myself had another destiny to fulfill in the world (...) And after having a great fight (this time with myself and it was the hardest of all),

In November 1943, a final judgment was passed through which she was divorced from Enrique de Quesada Loynaz, whom she married on December 16, 1937.

I decided to do what is done in these circumstances, to undertake a long journey, and the chosen lands were those of South America that I still did not know, and that was the opportunity that the man who had been my first boyfriend took advantage of to follow me throughout the continent. (…) He remained single and had sworn not to marry anyone but me (…) So, then, I understood that it had been useless to oppose so many obstacles and for so many years to the force of destiny, and when I returned from that trip I married he (…) we were already very old, he was fifty-three years old and I was about to turn forty-three. 26 years, two months and 18 days had passed since the distant afternoon we met back in 1920.

The marriage with the journalist Pablo Álvarez de Cañas materialized on December 8, 1946 and then she acquired her house in Vedado, the mansion on the corner of 19 and E where today the Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center is located .

On October 10 of the following year, the Cuban State granted him the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes National Order of Merit , in the rank of Lady, which years later he would raise to the rank of Commander, while Spain grants him the Cross of Alfonso X El Sabio . In 1959 she was elected a full member of the Cuban Academy of the Language . So do we have any idea who Dulce María Loynaz is already?

In 1961 Pablo Álvarez de Cañas traveled abroad and did not return until 1972. Two years later, on August 3, 1974, he died in Havana. She survives him until April 27, 1997. Dulce María is 94 years old when she dies. His brothers Enrique, Carlos Manuel and Flor have already preceded him.

Becoming popular in her majestic old age, because she was surely aware of it, must have represented an experience that Dulce María Loynaz never thought about. Another thing is the celebrity, who in the Spanish-speaking world did touch her long before important awards came to her.

Dulce María published her first poems in La Nación , around 1920, when she traveled to the United States and Europe, on a journey that spanned the exotic Egypt, which inspired her famous love letter to Tut-Ank-Amen . In reality, the eldest daughter of the Liberation Army brigadier Enrique Loynaz del Castillo - author of the Invader Hymn - traveled the world all over. In her wanderings, she reached Turkey, Syria, Libya and Palestine, South America, Mexico and the Canary Islands, to be declared an Adoptive Daughter, not surprisingly considering that she wrote Un verano en Tenerife , a seductive travel book.

A lawyer by profession and sometimes pigeonholed as a poet, her prose work is forgotten, with the novel Jardín —edited in Spain, 1951—, Un verano en Tenerife , already mentioned, and various essay works exhibited sometimes in the manner of lectures. His poetic work, also not extensive, enjoys great preference among readers: Song to the sterile woman, Verses, Water Games, Poems without a name, Last days of a house, Selected poems ...

Quite an enigma for those who did not know her, who did share in the small group of her affections, remember her possessing a deep goodness, although sometimes sad.

In terms of awards, he went further than any of his contemporaries. In 1992 he was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes, considered the Nobel Prize for Spanish literature. In Cuba he received the  1987 National Prize for Literature and the First Degree Félix Varela Order . The University of Havana awarded him an honorary doctorate . He directed the Cuban Academy of the Language and in 1968 he acceded to the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language , as a member.

It is considered the most important of the Cuban lyrical voices of the 20th century and also the most universal. Cubaliteraria is honored to remember it.