Arts and Literature of Cuba

By the late 1980s, however, Cuba had begun to open up a

bit culturally. And the work of Dulce María Loynaz was dis-

covered and widely embraced by Cubans for the first time.

Young women, in particular, celebrated Loynaz as a sort of

feminist icon in their male-dominated culture.

In 1992 Loynaz won Spain’s prestigious Cervantes Prize,

which is awarded each year to a Spanish-language writer for

lifetime achievement. This touched off a rush to reissue her old

books and to publish work she’d completed decades earlier but

never published (she appears to have stopped writing poetry in

1959).

By all appearances, Loynaz enjoyed her late-arriving

acclaim. She called the Cervantes Prize “a secret door into

heaven.” She died in 1997 at the age of 94.

Heberto Padilla: Politics and Poetry

“Where the paths of poetry and politics cross,” Heberto Padilla

observed, “there is little room for reconciliation.” It was a les-

son he learned through experience.

Born in 1932 in the western province of Pinar del Río,

Heberto Padilla would show an interest in poetry from early

childhood. He published his first volume of verse at the age of

17.

Padilla opposed the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and

during the 1950s he left Cuba to live in the United States. He

returned to his native land after the triumph of the Cuban

Revolution in 1959.

For a while, Padilla enthusiastically supported Castro. He

was hopeful that the revolution would usher in a new era of