Belkis was born in Guantánamo, Cuba. She studied Humanities in la Universidad de Oriente. In 1967 she married Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. Though initially a supporter of the Castro Revolution, Belkis later became a censor critic of his regime. She was jailed with Padilla in 1971 charged with "subversive writing", It was known later as the "Padilla affair". She went into exile in the United States with her little son in 1979, until the Cuban goverment authorized him to leave Cuba. She founded Linden Lane Magazine, a review of Latin American and North American writers in 1982. And in 1996, La Casa
Azul.
Libros publicados:
El viento en la pared,1962.
Los alucinados,1963.
Tiempos de sol,1963.
Cartas a Ana Frank,1966.
El clavel y la rosa: biografía de Juana Borrero, 1984.
Woman on the Front Lines. (Includes Juego de damas y El patio de mi casa . Trans. Pamela Carmell). Greensboro: Unicorn Press, Inc., 1987.
Elvis. The Unquiet Grave or the True Story of Jon Burrows, 1994, Juego de damas, 2002 and La otra mejilla, Ediciones Lunáticas ZV, Paris, 2008. In 2011, Linden Lane Press published her nook of poems Los poemas de la mujer de Lot.