After the triumph of the Revolution, Carilda Oliver Labra continued a stylistic line similar to the one she had developed in the preceding stage. The poet had managed to save her childhood gaze from the passage of time and maintained a commendable purity of spirit, a capacity for wonder at the reality that surrounded her, and also the rescued reminiscence of childhood, one that never ends but is inherent at all times to her perspective on life, as can be seen in the first stanza of “La violeta combate,” contained in the decimario “Tú eres mañana”:

“If as a girl -almost bad-
I entertained myself in the notebook
pretending to be a poet
and then I was left without a wing,
If every dream cuts me down,
If they always talk to me about…
if my family left
to hurt under the snow
Am I happy or don’t you dare?
my heart of ABC?”

This notebook also includes tributes to vital symbols dear to Carilda, such as the city of Matanzas and the life and poetry of Martí, the first of which is the lyrical testimony “Canto a Matanzas”, in which the spiritual connection with her city is appreciated above other considerations, and in the poem “Glosa”, composed of four décimas, each of which culminates with one of these Martí verses: “I think when I am happy / like a simple schoolboy / of the yellow canary / that has such a black eye.”

In 1983, “Las jarabes y el tiempo” (Syllables and Time) was published, a book crafted from the feeling of love in all its aspects, intertwined with death, but not only the love of a couple but also filial love, the father, the mother, the absent, the moving verses of “Mother of Mine Who Are in a Letter,” in which the poet sheds her aesthetic garments to say only: “Mama / come back with the terral, enter into time, / take advantage of the miracle of the afternoon; / I will take your mending hand / that smell of pineapple, / you must find in the hall the areca / that dried up from shedding tears.”

The following year, she published the collection of poems “Desaparece el polvo” (Dust Disappears), in which the mature woman emerges, having already surpassed the most dramatic stages of her life and learned from these events, without abandoning her essential way of facing joy and adversity and her deep intimacy with love, as seen in “Es una carta donde digo: amado” (It’s a letter where I say: loved) and “Desnudo y para siempre” (Naked and forever). In this text, the most refined metrics and soaring free verse converge with similar poetic quality—something she had already cultivated in her previous works.

For her part, in “Anoche” and “Discurso de Eva”, also collected in this last collection of poems, the poetess captures with unusual authenticity the feminine erotic, in the latter also the anguish and the disappointments or rather the bittersweet taste of absence, an authenticity without equal in the verse “make me another Turkish key”, which would border on the vulgar if it were not for Carilda’s mastery in amalgamating the cultured and the popular, the meditative and the conversational.

Excerpts from “Last Night” are reproduced:

“Last night I slept with a man and his shadow.
The constellations know nothing about the case.
His verses were bullets that I taught to fly.
There was a cardiac arrest.”
(…)
Today I found that stain on the bed,
so deep
that I began to think seriously:
“Life fits in a drop.”

In 1987, the brief anthology “Calzada de Tirry 81” was published, which brings together important pieces from the lyrical career of Carilda Oliver Labra. Later, she would conceive the titles “Los huesos alumbrados”, “Se me ha perdido un hombre”, “Prometida al fuego” and a more comprehensive anthology would be published, with the title “Error de magia”, as a tribute to the poetic vitality of the Matanzas native par excellence.