When she had barely begun her university studies, she won the first science fiction competition ever organized in Cuba with her short story collection "Los mundos que amo" ("The Worlds I Love"), in 1979. After the book was published (1980), the main story was adapted and published as a photonovel in 1982, selling 200,000 copies in 3 months, an unprecedented fact that started her popularity as an author. The plot - almost the same in the short story and in its photonovel version - has been considered "an editorial phenomenon" that "questioned the hierarchical structures that the governing institutions of the revolutionary culture imposed in the literary field as early as 1960". This sales record "broke with an editorial logic that considered science fiction as a minor genre." Furthermore, "Daína Chaviano claimed literary genres established and controlled mostly by male writers who arrived with the Revolution - that is, writers who did not take part in the processes of the pre-1959 revolutionary struggle - a recognition that placed science fiction written by women, in feminine, in the Cuban editorial map and in the space of national culture".