Carilda Oliver Labra was a Cuban poet born in Matanzas and who died in the same city in 2018. She is one of the most influential lyric voices in contemporary Cuban poetry, and her name is linked to the so-called Golden Age of Cuban poetry, alongside Nicolás Guillén and José Lezama Lima.
She studied law in Havana and fine arts in Matanzas, and worked as a teacher, cultural official and lawyer. She published Preludio lírico in 1943 and, in 1949, Al sur de mi garganta, a collection with which she won the National Poetry Prize in 1950. Her verse blends traces of neoromanticism, surrealist echoes and Cuban colloquial speech, and she used both the sonnet and the décima as well as free verse. Love, desire and sensuality are her main themes, though she also wrote about Matanzas and political matters. Her frankness about her personal life shocked part of the conservative society of her time, and the writer Miguel Barnet regards her as one of the great voices of Cuban lyric poetry.