Her grandfather was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who is the father of the nation of Cuba,[2] and a distant cousin was Perucho Figueredo.

Her fiction writing was greatly influenced by the cultural developments that led to and resulted from World War II.

[2] From June 1952 to the late 1958 she wrote an advice column, called Dalla parte di lei, in the magazine Epoca.

Although her books were bestsellers, De Céspedes has been overlooked in recent studies of Italian women writers.

One of the events, attended by Fidel Castro, was held in Manzanillo, Cuba, where her grandfather, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, on 10 October 1868, had made a speech against Spain which started the Ten Years' War.