The Cuban-Mexican academic Alejandro González Acosta revealed in an interview with CiberCuba the unknown details behind the 1992 Cervantes Prize awarded to Dulce María Loynaz. He shared with CiberCuba that the winning nomination did not originate from Cuba, but rather from Mexico, due to a chain of coincidences in which he played a significant role. He also recounted an anecdote that portrays the poetess as a woman of strong character.
A Dulce María Loynaz, whom he treated with great closeness, describes her as someone who had little to do with her name. “She wasn’t 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 in the Protocol Room of Cubanacán. She was dressed in black, wearing a Balenciaga gown and carrying a Louis Vuitton bag. The pretorian guard wanted to search her bag, and Dulce María Loynaz calmly responded to an officer: "Son, I am the daughter of a mambi general, and in my family, if I wanted to kill your prime minister (she never referred to him as president, only prime minister), we use machetes, not guns."
Acosta recalls thinking at that moment: "The one who is going to be arrested is me." But after that incident, they let her pass without checking her bag.
El Cervantes, thanks to Mexico
"The proposal for the Cervantes Prize for Dulce María Loynaz did not come from Cuba; it came from Mexico," highlighted González Acosta, a researcher at the Institute of 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 what he recounts, he was the one who proposed Loynaz within the Academy on three occasions. The poetess herself thanked him with a phrase that the academic remembers precisely: "Listen, thank you, but notice that the other colleagues didn’t take the initiative."
However, the final nomination was born outside the island. González Acosta edited alongside Gonzalo Celorio —then the coordinator of cultural diffusion at UNAM and recent recipient of the Cervantes Prize 2025—a very brief anthology of poems by Loynaz: "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 Hispanic-Mexican patron Eulalio Ferrer, founder of the Cervantina Foundation of Mexico and promoter of the International Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato.
Ferrer was fascinated; he traveled 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 was at that time the director of the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation (AECI) and a key figure in promoting the award, and he managed the nomination.
González Acosta also denies the official version that circulated in Cuba. "That is a lie, the official proposal from Cuba was Eliseo Diego," not Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as it was claimed.
The house of Loynaz in El Vedado, where the Cuban Academy of Language met monthly and which the academic describes as "the only independent institution" that remained in Cuba, was later converted 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 poetess's home with stones and eggs. González Acosta claims that he and Eusebio Leal went to protect her.
The scholar details the complete story 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 "poetess" and not "poet," summarizing her view of art as follows: "The purpose 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 have obtained it up to that point. The official ceremony took place in 1993, presented by the current emeritus king Juan Carlos I of Spain, at the Paraninfo of the University of Alcalá de Henares.
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