Cabrera Infante, Guillermo (1929–2005)

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (b. 22 April 1929, d. 21 February 2005), Cuban novelist and essayist. Cabrera Infante was born in Gibara in Oriente Province. In 1947 he moved to Havana with his parents and began studying medicine at the University of Havana. After quickly deciding to take up writing, he abandoned medicine for journalism. In 1952 he was arrested and fined for publishing a short story that contained English profanities. In the late 1950s he began to earn prizes with his short stories.

Meanwhile, his passion for the cinema led him to film reviewing. Under the pseudonym G. Caín, he wrote film reviews and articles on the cinema for the weekly Carteles, becoming its editor in chief in 1957. He was the founder of Cinemateca de Cuba, the Cuban Film Society, over which he presided from 1951 to 1956. In 1959 he became director of the Cuban Film Institute and of the literary magazine Lunes de revolución. In 1962 he served the Cuban government as cultural attaché in Belgium. In 1964 he received the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize for his novel Trestristes tigres (1971). In 1965 he decided to break with the Cuban government, leaving his diplomatic post and permanently settling in London.

By the mid-1990s, Cabrera Infante was the best-known living Cuban author. Tres tristes tigres, translated into English as Three Trapped Tigers, won him worldwide recognition. In this novel, as has been pointed out by such eminent critics as Emir Rodríguez Monegal, language itself is the main preoccupation. Here, too, as in all of Cabrera Infante's work, there is a great deal of humor, especially word games and puns. Because of this aspect of his work, he has been compared to Russian emigré writer Vladimir Nabokov. His mastery of the English language—one of his later novels, Holy Smoke (1985), was written in English—has also begged comparison with Joseph Conrad. Cabrera Infante, who became a British citizen, has said ironically that he is as English as muffins and is a happy subject of the queen. He died in London, and was survived by his second wife, actress Miriam Goméz, and two daughters from his first marriage.

Besides Tres tristes tigres, some of his best-known works are La Habana para un infante difunto (1984) and Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974). His novels have been widely translated.

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rosa María Pereda, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1979).

Stephanie Merrim, Logos and the Word: The Novel of Language and Linguistic Motivation in Grande sertao, veredas and Tres tristes tigres (1983).

Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, Novel Lives: The Fictional Autobiographies of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Mario Vargas Llosa (1986).

Dinorah Hernández Lima, Versiones y re-versiones históricas en la obra de Cabrera Infante (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.

Nelson, Ardis. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Assays, Essays and Other Arts. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Souza, Raymond. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

                                     Roberto Valero