NEW YORK -- More than 1,300 miles separate Matanzas, Cuba, from the heart of New York City. But just over a week ago, a long journey that playwright Nilo Cruz began when he left his Cuban hometown as a frightened 9-year-old ended just off Times Square when his play Anna in the Tropics opened, at last, on Broadway.

From a boy whose parents brought him to Miami on a Freedom Flight from Cuba in 1970 to a man who became the first Hispanic-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2003, Cruz has evolved from a struggling exile to an exalted artist, even though some New York critics found his poetic play about Cuban-American cigarmakers in Florida's Ybor City in 1929 less than transporting.

Even so, the weekend of Nov. 15-16 was one of the happiest in the 43-year-old playwright's life.

Part of it, of course, was the thrill of his first Broadway opening, of seeing a play written for the tiny 104-seat New Theatre in Coral Gables open in the 1,068-seat Royale, an ornate Broadway theater with murals of Spanish lovers on its second-floor ceiling. Too, there was the excitement of looking around the opening night audience and seeing fellow Pulitzer winners Edward Albee and Neil Simon, stars like Brian Stokes Mitchell and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Alfred Molina in the red velvet seats.

But what made the opening weekend sweetest for Cruz, who lives alone in an East Side apartment in New York, was that he got to experience it surrounded by family.

His former wife, artist Dorothy García, brought their 15-year-old daughter Chloe from Pasadena, Calif., where the Westridge High School freshman studies piano and is an aspiring jazz singer. Clara Martha Cruz, a Spanish teacher at Hialeah Gardens Elementary and one of Cruz's two older sisters, came up from her home in Westchester with her husband, Ramón Bezanilla, and daughter Krystel Ramos, a 17-year-old senior at Miami's St. Brendan Catholic High School. Missing were his father, also named Nilo Cruz, who passed away in 1999, and his mother Tina, who is recovering from knee surgery.

''It was really good that I could also have private moments with my family and share this experience in a more intimate way. They don't ask for anything. They allow you who you are. You can just hug them and kiss them,'' Cruz says.

``The media ask you to intellectualize emotion. I was certainly elated, but they still want you to articulate it. By the time I got to the opening night party [at The Supper Club], the last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. I was feeling so much, I was just trying to take it all in and experience it.''

That's what Cruz's extended family did. They squeezed in some family reunion time (they had breakfast at the Times Square Howard Johnson's), some quick tourist stops (the World Trade Center site and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum) and, of course, the in-the-spotlight glamour of a major Broadway opening night.

''We walked to the theater from my cousin's hotel, and there were all these photographers. It was crazy!'' says Ramos, who stayed up 'til 3 a.m. the night she arrived, catching up with her uncle, whom she sometimes calls ''Papi'' by mistake.

'I thought, `Wow, this is probably how Jennifer Lopez feels'. . . And the night before, we got to meet Jimmy Smits, who was so great, so elegant in the play in his white suit. Then we got to stand on the stage and look out at all those empty red seats.''

Ramos' mother, Clara Martha Cruz, was like the brother she still calls ''Nilito'' in feeling waves of overwhelming emotion.

''Anna is very meaningful for us. She's like a new sister, a new part of the family,'' says Cruz, who spent the day after her return from New York taking the poster of her brother's play from classroom to classroom at Hialeah Gardens, reminding the students that her Pulitzer Prize-winning brother was also a product of Miami-Dade's public school system.

``When we arrived at the theater and I saw all people outside, I was shaking. Then I saw my brother looking very elegant, and my daughter and niece had gardenias in their hair [like the character of Marela in the play].

``Our father's birthday would have been Nov. 15, and the gardenia was his favorite flower. And the name of the cigar factory in the play is Flor del Cielo, flower of the sky. So I thought of God, of our father, of our grandmother who loved theater and taught us to love it.''

Chloe García-Cruz, who still has braces on her teeth and whose glowing face reflects a blending of her parents' Cuban, Mexican and Japanese heritage, had seen an earlier production of Anna in the Tropics at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, Calif. She found the Broadway production faster-paced, more clear. And she marveled at the effect that her father's words had on the opening night crowd.

''I saw people crying,'' she says. ``It's an amazing story -- beautiful but very tragic. You have to finish the story for yourself. I loved it so much . . . I'm really happy for my father. I've seen four of his plays so far, and I don't think you can compare any of them. It's like comparing two beautiful things.''

Cruz's ex-wife Dorothy, an artist, sat with him and their daughter at the opening, her hair also sporting a gardenia from Cruz.

She says of Anna, ``You just felt the whole time. The feelings of the play live in Nilo . . . He's in touch with his feminine side. I don't think that very many men experience the broken-heartedness that Nilo does.''

On Nov. 16, though, Cruz was anything but broken-hearted. After the actors took their curtain call, basking in the warmth of applause and cheers, Smits left the stage, then brought out Cruz and director Emily Mann. The first-nighters lept to their feet, cheering, shouting ''Bravo!'' and ''Nilo!'' Emotions played across the smiling, tear-streaked face of the trim playwright, clad head-to-toe in black Prada, a gardenia on his lapel. It was, he says, something that ``. . . went so fast but lasted so long. It was thrills, humility, grace, generosity, all those emotions washing over me. And being so grateful.''

But the sweetest moment of all happened as he exited the stage, to find Dorothy and Chloe waiting in the wings.

''I hugged the two of them,'' he says. ``I was in the middle. It was lovely.''