A one-time supporter of the
politics of Fidel Castro, Cabrera Infante went into exile to
London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres tristes tigres (literally: "three sad tigers", published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to
James Joyce's Ulysses.
Biography
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 the
University of Havana.[2][3] 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 in 1961 and in the same year married his second wife, Miriam Gomez, an actress. Having fallen somewhat out of favor with the Castro regime (the government's ban on a documentary on Havana nightlife made by his brother led to his 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 went into exile, first in
Madrid, then in London.
In 1966 he published Tres tristes tigres, a highly experimental,
Joycean novel, playful and rich in literary allusions, which intended to do for Cuban Spanish what
Mark Twain had done for
American English, recording the great variety of its colloquial variations. It won the 1964
Premio Biblioteca Breve for best unpublished novel.[4]
Although he is considered a part of the famed
Latin American Boom generation of writers that includes his contemporary
Gabriel García Márquez, he disdained the label. Ever an iconoclast, he even rejected the label "novel" to describe his most acclaimed works, such as Tres tristes tigres and La Habana para un infante difunto. He was influential to Puerto Rican and Cuban writers such as
Luis Rafael Sánchez (La guaracha del Macho Camacho) and Fernando Velázquez Medina (Última rumba en La Habana).
In 1997 he received the
Premio Cervantes, presented to him by King
Juan Carlos of Spain. He died on February 21, 2005, in London, of
sepsis. He had two daughters from his first marriage.
Bibliography
Así en la paz como en la guerra (1960, "In peace as in war"; a pun on a line from the Lord's Prayer), short story collection
Twentieth Century Job (1963, published in Spanish as "Un oficio del siglo XX"), collection of film reviews
Tres tristes tigres (1967, 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), novel
Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974, published in English as "A View of Dawn in the Tropics"), novel
O (1975), short story / essay collection
Exorcismos de esti(l)o (1976, "Exorcisms of style"; estilo means style and estío, summertime), novel/short story collection
La Habana para un Infante Difunto (1979, 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), novel
Holy Smoke (1985, in English, later translated into Spanish as Puro Humo), a fictionalized "history" of cigars
Mea Cuba (1991, the title implies "My Cuba" but also means "Cuba Pisses" or "Cuba is Pissing" and is a pun on "Mea Culpa"), political essays
Arcadia todas las noches (1995, "Arcadia every night"), essays
Delito por bailar el chachachá (1995, in English: Guilty of Dancing the ChaChaCha, 2001, translated by himself), short story collection
Ella Cantaba Boleros (1996, "She Sang Boleros", consists of sections taken from Tres Tristes Tigres), two novellas
Cine o sardina (1997, "Cinema or sardine", alludes to the choice his mother gave him between eating and going to the movies), collection of articles
Vidas para leerlas (1998, "Lives to be read"), essays
El Libro de las Ciudades (1999, "The Book of the Cities"), collection of writings
Todo está hecho con espejos: Cuentos casi completos (1999, trans. "Everything is Made with Mirrors: Nearly Complete Stories"), short story collection
Infantería (2000, title is a pun on his name and the Spanish for "infantry"), collection of writings
La ninfa inconstante (2008, "The Inconstant Nymph", posthumous), novel