Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (April 22, 1929 – February 21, 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín.

A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres (published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses.

Life

Born in Gibara in Cuba's former Oriente Province (now part of Holguín Province), in 1941 he moved with his parents, to Havana, which would be the setting of nearly all of his writings other than his critical works. His parents were founding members of the Cuban Communist Party.

Originally he intended to become a physician, but abandoned that in favor of writing and his passion for the cinema. Starting in 1950, he studied journalism at he University of Havana.

In 1951 he founded the Cinemateca de Cuba, of which he remained director until its closure was ordered by Fulgencio Batista in 1956. Under the Batista regime he was arrested and fined in 1952 for publishing a short story which included several English-language profanities. His opposition to Batista later cost him a short jail term.

He married for the first time in 1953. From 1954 to 1960 he wrote film reviews for the magazine Carteles, using the pseudonym G. Caín; he became its editor in chief, still pseudonymously, in 1957. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 he was named director of the Instituto del Cine. He was also head of the literary magazine Lunes de Revolución, a supplement to the Communist newspaper Revolución; however, this supplement was prohibited in 1961 by Fidel Castro.

He divorced and remarried in 1961 to his second wife, Miriam, an actress. Having fallen somewhat, but not totally, out of favor with the Castro regime (the government's ban on a documentary on Havana nightlife made by his brother led to him being forbidden to publish in Cuba), he served from 1962 to 1965 in Brussels, Belgium as a cultural attaché. During this time, his sentiments turned against the Castro regime; after returning to Cuba for his mother's funeral in 1965, he exiled himself, first to Madrid and then to London.

In 1966 he published Tres tristes tigres, a highly experimental, Joycean novel, playful and rich in literary allusions, which also intended to do for Cuban Spanish what Mark Twain had done for American English, recording the great variety of its colloquial variations.

In 1997 he received the Premio Cervantes, which was given to him by Spain's King Juan Carlos.

He died February 21, 2005 in London, of septicemia. He had two daughters by his first marriage.

Works

• Así en la paz como en la guerra (1960, "So in peace as in war")
• Twentieth Century Job (1963, film reviews)
• Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1964, novel, published in English as "A View of Dawn in the Tropics")
• Tres Tristes Tigres (1967, novel, published in English as Three Trapped Tigers; the original title refers to a Spanish-language tongue-twister, and literally means "Three Sad Tigers"); portions of this were later republished as Ella cantaba boleros
• Exorcismos de esti(l)o (1976, novel, "Exorcisms of style"; estilo means style and estío, summertime)
• La Habana por un Infante Difunto (1979, memoir, published in English as Infante's Inferno; the Spanish title is a pun on "Pavane pour une infante defunte", title of a piano piece by Maurice Ravel)
• Holy Smoke, 1985 (in English, later translated into Spanish as Puro Humo)
• Cine o sardina (1997, "Cinema or sardine")
• Vidas para leerlas (1998, essays, "Lives to be read")
• Arcadia todas las noches ("Arcadia every night")
• Mea Cuba (1991, political essays, the title means "Piss Cuba" and is a pun on "Mea Culpa")
• Infantería (title is a pun on his name and the Spanish for "infantry")

Cabrera Infante also translated James Joyce's Dubliners into Spanish (1972) and wrote screenplays, including the adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.

References

• Guillermo Cabrera Infante (in Spanish, part of Biografías y Vidas). Retrieved February 22, 2005.
• Guillermo Cabrera Infante (in Spanish, from a site about the Premio Cervantes). Retrieved February 22, 2005.
• Guillermo Cabrera Infante (in Spanish, from LiteraturaCubana.com). Retrieved February 22, 2005.
• "Cuban-born novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante dies", Associated Press obituary, on the site of The Guardian. Retrieved February 22, 2005.