looking out from the garden toward a city that resembles Havana. In 1950, she published weekly chronicles at different publications of the epoch such as El País, Excélsior, Social, Grafos, Diario de la Marina, El Mundo, Revista Cubana, Revista Bimestre Cubana and Orígenes. In 1953, she attended as the university's guest, celebrations that marked the 700th year since the naming of Salamanca University. Her book Poemas sin nombre (Untitled Poems) was translated to Italian in 1955. She participated in conferences and readings, not only in Cuba but also in Spain and Latin America. She was elected as a member of the Arts and Literature National Academy in 1951, of the Cuban Academy of Language in 1959 and the Spanish Royal Academy of Language in 1968. The Royal Academy of Spanish Language nominated her for the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1984. In 1985, Poesías Escogidas (Selected Poems) and Bestarium (a book of poems written before 1959) were published in Havana. During these years, she participated in conferences, gave speeches, and received prizes and awards bestowed by different Cuban cultural institutions. The sobriety of her lyric expression, her exquisite handling of language, and master use of Castilian language were the main reasons taken into account to confer her the King Alfonso X the Wise Order and on November 5, 1992, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, an honorable distinction she received in Spain in 1992 from King Juan Carlos I's hands. This is considered the Nobel prize in the world of the Spanish literature. In 1959 she voluntarily stopped writing and publishing in Cuba. In a situation such as Cuba's over the past 40 years, it is not surprising that a person as private in temperament as Dulce María Loynaz would seclude herself, or that her public statements have always been extremely discreet, patriotic, and yet non-political. More perplexing is the fact that, according to all her closest friends, she entirely stopped writing poetry when the Revolution triumphed in 1959. Although her work was characterized by so many of her friends as a private vocation, perhaps the total disappearance of the social world which fostered it, silenced her. The discovery of her work by a large and enthusiastic audience in her home country when she was in her 80s, really for the first time and after more than 25 years of internal exile, must have been like the return of the dove