Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante is considered one of the most important contemporary writers. A British citizen who has been living in exile for over 30 years, Cabrera Infante's work particularly his novels Tres tristes tigres (1967), Vista del amanecer en el tropico (1974), and La Habana para un infante difunto (1979) are considered an important part of Spanish literature.
Background
The older of two brothers, Guillermo Cabrera Infante was bom in the northern city of Gibara on April 22, 1929. His parents, Guillermo Cabrera López and Zoila Infante Castro, were political activists who, along with other individuals, organized the local Communist Party in Gibara in 1933. One of the most traumatic events in Cabrera Infante's childhood in Gibara was in 1936, when he witnessed local military police violently invade his home, and arrest, and subsequently incarcerate, his mother for her political activities. His father, captured later that day, was also incarcerated.
After their release six months later, no one would hire Guillermo Sr., who had been a reporter; the family scraped by on Zoila Infante's income as a seamstress. By 1941, the family moved to Havana, where six of them lived in a squalid one-room tenement, sharing a bathroom with other families. Cabrera Infante described his living conditions to his biographer, Raymond Souza: "I was genuinely ashamed of living in that place". Many of the descriptions of Havana in La Habana para un infante difunto are drawn from his experiences at this time.
Education
By age four, he was enrolled in Los Amigos, a private Quaker school. He was a fan of the cartoons that appeared in the Sunday paper and he used them to teach himself to read. From 1942 to 1946, with the encouragement and support of his father, Cabrera Infante attended night school and learned English. These early years in Havana also stirred his interest in Cuban and American popular cultural activities; he was an avid aficionado of Cuban music and American jazz.
In 1950 he began to pursue a degree at Cuba's national School of Journalism. His journalism studies were cut short in 1952 after the government was over-thrown by a military uprising. Cabrera Infante's short story "A Ballad of Bullets and Bull's Eyes," which contained English profanities, was published in Bohemia that year. This story led to his arrest and incarceration by the Castro regime, which also prohibited him from publishing under his own name. He began writing under the pseudonyms Caín, Jonás Castro, and S. del Pastora Niño.
Career
Cabrera Infante's development as writer was a result of various experiences during the 1940s. His first serious interest in literature had its inception in 1946 with discovery of the Greek classics The Iliad and the Odyssey. That same year he received certification to teach English, and for a while he also translated articles from the American socialist press for the Cuban Communist Party's newspaper Hoy, whose literal translation means "today."
Through his tenure with Hoy, Cabrera Infante met contemporary Cuban writers such as Nicolás Guillén. In addition, his association with journalist Carlos Franqui, who later became his close friend, exposed him to such U.S. writers as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. In 1947, on a dare from Franqui, Cabrera Infante wrote his first story and presented it to the editor of the magazine Bohemia, who to his surprise published the parody titled "Aguas del recuerdo" (Waters of Memory) and paid him what amounted to $50. This was followed by another published story and an offer from Bohemia's editor, Antonio Ortega, of a job as his personal secretary.
Ortega opened Spanish and world literature to Cabrera Infante and in many ways mentored his development as a writer. His work with Bohemia included reviewing manuscripts and writing literary notices. He also served as a proofreader for other newspapers and was one of the founding members of the periodicals Nuestro Tiempo (Our Time) and Nueva Generación (New Generation), where he published his first movie reviews. In 1949 he completed studies in cinematography and two years later established with Tomás Guitiérrez Alea, Germán Puíg, Ricardo Vignón, and Nestor Almendros the film library Cinemateca de Cuba (Cuban Cinemateca).
In 1954 Cabrera Infante was appointed feature writer for films of Carteles, a weekly magazine similar to Bohemia. One of his most memorable pieces was "The Beauty of the Bomb," written under the pseudonym Jonás Castro. It included 12 dramatic pictures of atomic explosions described as "vivid images of beauty and destruction whose symmetrical or twisted forms have haunted the human imagination since they first appeared" (Souza 1996,28). By 1954 he was writing a regular movie column under the name Cain that became renowned in Cuba and throughout the Caribbean. At the same time, Cabrera Infante had begun writing for, and later took charge of, the anti-government paper Revolución, which became the revolutionary movement's official organ.
By 1956 he had received his journalism degree and was considered the most important film critic in Havana. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, Cabrera Infante a supporter of the revolution became a member of the Castro regime's entourage and traveled abroad with the revolutionary leader, an experience that gave him intimate exposure to Castro's personality. One of his most important posts during that era was his appointment as the editor of Lunes de Revolución, a weekly cultural supplement to the daily paper Revolución that was considered among the best magazines ever published in Cuba. Lunes covered the arts, politics, and philosophy, and included contributions from such well-known authors as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Le Roi Jones, and Wright Mills.
The Castro regime, finding the magazine's articles outside the party line, eventually closed down Lunes; Cabrera Infante's discontent with the revolution increased as his days as an editor came to close in 1961. Perhaps to keep him far away from Havana, the government appointed him cultural attaché in Cuba's Brussels Embassy in 1962. In 1964, a manuscript titled T.T.T., a predecessor to his seminal novel Tres tristes tigres, won the prestigious Spanish Biblioteca Breve Prize.
Cabrera Infante visited Cuba for the last time in 1965 to attend his mother's funeral. Once there, he was not allowed to leave the country until four months later when, under the pretext of meeting with his editors in Barcelona, Spain, he defected. His life in exile began to pay off in 1966 when he began working on
British film scripts, and through the publication what is perhaps his most well-known novel, Tres tristes tigres (1967; published in English as Three Trapped Tigers, 1971), a narration of nightlife in pre-revolutionary Havana that reflects his disillusionment with the Castro regime. In 1979 he produced La Habana para un infante difunto (translated in 1984 as Infante's Inferno), a fictional autobiography that takes place in the Havana of the 1940s and 1950s.