The Communist revolution triumphed in 1959,. and Pablo Alvarez de Cañas soon left the country. Dulce María remained secluded in the home they had shared in the formerly-fashionable El Vedado district of Havana.

In a Havana interview with Judith Kerman, Miguel Barnet discussed Loynaz’s political position after the Revolution.

{Audio Link: Barnet - the political situation}

When asked why she did not emigrate, Dulce María explained simply that she stayed in Cuba after the Revolution because “I was here first.”

More than 10 years later, her husband Pablo returned, terminally ill; he died in Cuba in 1974. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper Diario 16 at the time she received the Cervantes prize, Dulce María reflected, "In my life I have shed so many tears for this man that I had none left to pour into his tomb.."

Although she participated in a poetry festival organized by the Cuban Writers’ Union in 1968, presented a few academic papers in the 70’s, and was involved in the Cuban branch of the Royal Academy of Language, chronologies of Dulce María’s life from the Revolution through the early 1980's are mostly marked by the deaths of her husband, father, and two brothers.

{Audio Link: Barnet - emergence in the 1980's}

Dulce María self-imposed seclusion was quite successful. As Pedro Simón described it to me, her emergence around the time of her nomination for the Cervantes prize was a great surprise to the public. Unknown to almost everyone, she had been living there in Havana all along.

{Audio Link: Simón - the Cervantes nomination}

In the 1970’s, well before the cultural thaw of the 1980’s, Dulce María received a letter from Aldo Martínez Malo, a man she had never met who had been a fan of hers in his youth. Later, much to the surprise and dismay of some Havana cultural leaders, Dulce María’s art collection, archives and manuscripts were given to a group of friends, including Malo, in the distant provincial capital of Pinar del Río, where a foundation was established for the study of the works of the four Loynaz sisters and brothers.

{Audio Link: Malo's friendship with Dulce María}

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