The Cuban-Mexican academic Alejandro González Acosta revealed in an interview with CiberCuba the unknown details behind the 1992 Cervantes Award granted to Dulce María Loynaz. He shared with CiberCuba that the winning proposal did not originate from Cuba, but rather from Mexico, thanks to a chain of coincidences in which he played a significant role. He also recounted an anecdote that portrays the poetess as a strong and determined woman.
A Dulce María Loynaz, whom he treated with great closeness, is described as someone who had little in common with her name. “She was not Sweet. To begin with, the name (her real name was Mercedes) was given to her incorrectly because she was very strong, very tough.”
González Acosta recounts that she accompanied her to receive a Culture Medal at the Palace of the Revolution. She was dressed in black, wearing a Balenciaga dress and carrying a Louis Vuitton bag. The praetorian guard wanted to search her bag, and Dulce María Loynaz calmly replied to an officer, "Son, I am the daughter of a mambi general, and in my family, if I wanted to kill your prime minister (because she never referred to him as president, only as prime minister), we use machetes, not guns."
Acosta remembers thinking at that moment, "I'm the one who's going to be arrested." But after that incident, they let her pass without checking her bag.
The Cervantes, thanks to Mexico
"The proposal for the Cervantes Prize for Dulce María Loynaz did not come from Cuba, it came from Mexico," emphasized González Acosta, a researcher at the Institute for Bibliographic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a member of the Cuban Academy of Language since April 23, 1983.
According to his account, he was the one who proposed Loynaz within the Academy on three occasions. The poetess herself thanked him with a phrase that the academic recalls precisely: "Hey, thanks, but notice that the other colleagues didn't take the initiative."
However, the final candidacy was born outside the island. González Acosta edited, alongside Gonzalo Celorio—then coordinator of cultural dissemination at UNAM and the recent recipient of the Cervantes Prize 2025—a very brief anthology of Loynaz's poems: "The Bride of Lazarus," "The Sterile Woman," and "The Love Letter to Tutankhamun."
When the book was brought to Cuba, González Acosta presented a copy to the Hispano-Mexican patron Eulalio Ferrer, founder of the Cervantine Foundation of Mexico and promoter of the International Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato.
Ferrer was fascinated, traveling to Cuba specifically to meet Loynaz, and upon his return, he made a decision: "This woman should be nominated for the Cervantes Prize."
The patron then contacted the Spanish diplomat Inocencio Arias, who at that time was the director of the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation (AECI) and a key figure in promoting the award, to manage the nomination.
González Acosta also refutes the official version that circulated in Cuba. "That's a lie, the official proposal from Cuba was Eliseo Diego," not Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as it had been claimed.
Loynaz's house in El Vedado, where the Cuban Academy of the Language met monthly and which the academic describes as "the only independent institution" remaining in Cuba, was later transformed into a cultural center, although today it is in a state of disrepair.
During the Mariel exodus, neighbors from the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) attacked the poet's home with stones and eggs. González Acosta claims that he and Eusebio Leal went to protect her.
The academic details the complete history in his book La Dama de América, published by Felipe Lázaro at Editorial Betania in Madrid, where he also includes the literary reflections of Loynaz, who insisted on being called "poetisa" and not "poeta," summarizing her vision of art in this way: "The utility of poetry is its beauty; we should not ask for more. Poetry of commitments, no."
The Cervantes Prize awarded to Loynaz in 1992 made her the second woman to receive it, following María Zambrano in 1988, and the only Latin American writer to obtain it up to that point. The official ceremony took place in 1993, presided over by the current emeritus king Juan Carlos I of Spain, at the Paraninfo of the University of Alcalá de Henares.
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