Word: cabrera
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...surprising that only now, so long after he left Cuba, has Guillermo Cabrera Infante published Vista Del Amanecer en el Tropico, (View of Dawn in the Tropics), his denunciation of the Cuban Revolution. Surprisingly, because it took so long for such a beautiful damnation to arrive from the Cuban opposition and because despite the passage of time, this book is as bitter as though its writer had left the island yesterday. Cabrera Infante has been an opponent of the Cuban government since he left the island in the early sixties. Like many exiles, he supported Castro at the beginning...
Vista del Amanecer, Cabrera's newest statement, published in 1974, is a grimly serious book, soaked with desperate humor. It is a collection of short pieces, difficult to define, few of them more than a page long, meditations on images in Cuban history. At worst they resemble Reader's Digest fillers, but at their best they are epiphanies. Each one presents a static image or a brief moment. To explain the colonial period, for example, they describe engravings: conquistadores meeting Indians, bloodhounds catching a runaway slave...
...Cabrera's pessimism and deadpan irony cement these fragments into a book. Whether he is describing some feat of unbelievable bravery, such as peasants armed only with machetes attacking a Spanish cavalry unit, some amazing apathy or some quite ordinary cowardice, he always deflates heroic claims that men control their destiny. Battles are planned with strategy and won by blind chance. So many of these incidents are simultaneously horrible and funny that the reader is only left wondering, or cynical...
...chronological succession of the anecdotes supports and forms Cabrera Infante's argument against the Castro government. It takes a brief look at early colonial history, then concentrates on three struggles: the wars for independence, the struggles against the dictators, and the Revolution. Cabrera shows that the history of cruelty and violence on the island has known no beginning or end. Forced to adapt to a life of continual war in order to survive, Cubans have become indifferent to the potential terrors of their situation. "... his host brought him an aspirin, and finally the young terrorist lay down...
...Cabrera attacks the Cuban revolution simply by describing selected scenes. He tells of a waiter turned terrorist who becomes a police interrogator, lives in a confiscated mansion, and wins the rank of commander. He recalls some comic and heroic escapes, such as the two men who stowed away in the landing gear of a plane flying to Spain; one of them fell out during the journey but the other arrived eight hours later, half-frozen. The charge that the book spins is guilt by association: the Cuban Revolution was conceived in this tradition of violence and it is essentially...