Cabrera Infante, Guillermo

(Cuban, 1929– )

Cabrera Infante met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the years leading to the Cuban Revolution, but left Cuba permanently in 1965. His fiction since then has been much preoccupied with the recovery of the immediate Cuban past of Infante's own youth. His most celebrated novel is Three Trapped Tigers (1965), in which the memories of a Cuban exile cast a powerful shadow of nostalgia over an often irreverent human comedy, while Infante's Inferno (1984) is a semi-autobiographical account of Infante's own upbringing in the Havana of the 1950s. A self-confessed Marxist of the Groucho variety, Infante's style is characterized by densely layered puns and a relish for intellectual jokes. Holy Smoke (1985) is a non-fiction study of cigar-smoking that draws on the same themes of memory, exile, and pleasure as the fiction.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende.

See MAGIC REALISM  WB