Dulce María Loynaz

Dulce María Loynaz (10 December 1902 – 27 April 1997) was a Cuban poet.

Dulce María Loynaz was the daughter of the famous General Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, a hero of the Cuban Liberation Army and author of the lyrics of the march theme, "El Himno Invasor", and sister of poet Enrique Loynaz Muñoz. Dulce María was born in Havana City, on December 10, 1902, in a family of great sensibility towards artistic and cultural manifestations and deep patriotic feelings. Home schooled, she grew up in a familiar environment highly propitious for poetry.

Although Dulce María had a sheltered childhood, her early adulthood was much more adventurous, including experiences available at that time only to wealthy young women, even outside of Cuba. She published a number of poems in her teens and twenties. She completed the Doctorate of Civil Law at the University of Havana in 1927, but she practiced law rarely. She was able to travel widely. In addition, her talents and her family’s social position brought her into personal contact with some of the major Spanish-language authors of the century, including ill-fated Spanish author Federico García Lorca and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (who won the Nobel Prize in 1945), Cuban author Alejo Carpentier and the Spanish writer Juan Ramón Jiménez, who won the Nobel Prize.

She published her first poems in La Nación, in 1920. Around those years, she travelled to North America, Europe and some other countries highlighting, Turkey, Syria, Libya, Palestine and Egypt (1929), Mexico (1937), South America (1946-1947) and the Canary Islands (1947-1951) where she was declared adoptive daughter. She achieved her Doctorate in Civil Law at Havana University. She was a practicing lawyer even though she disliked it, but stopped practicing in 1961.

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