Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Exiles never forget, of course, but the emigre communities in Miami, San Juan, and New Orleans have calmed down. Extremist groups may still throw a hand grenade down the gangplank of a Russian cruise ship or threaten the airlines of countries resuming diplomatic relations with Cuba, but the lurid billboard in San Juan that showed Cuban soldiers executing prisoners before a bloodsplashed wall disappeared years ago. Hardly anyone remembers its slogan...
...surprising that only now, so long after he left Cuba, has Guillermo Cabrera Infante published Vista del Amanecer in el Tropico, [View of Dawn in the Tropics], his denunciation of the Cuban Revolution. Surprising, because it has taken so long for an eloquent literary statement to arrive from the Cuban opposition, and because he writes as bitterly as though he had left the island yesterday. Cabrera Infante did not oppose the Cuban government with such vehemence when he emigrated in the early Sixties. Like many of the exiles, he supported Castro at the beginning; for three years...
CABRERA INFANTE is too eccentric for any political group to trust him, the prestige of his 1964 novel, Three Trapped Tigers, has given him authority as a spokesman for refugee Cuban intellectuals. Three Trapped Tigers suggested oblique criticism of socialist Cuba because it was nostalgic for the bad old days of casinos, airconditioning and frivolity. Full of word play and nasty irreverence, it seemed to laugh in the face of socialist realism. But since then, especially after a celebrated case of censorship in 1969, Cabrera's feelings about Cuba hardened...
...chronological progression of the pieces stands as Cabrera Infante's argument against the Castro government. He shows that the history of cruelty and violence on the island has known no beginning or end. Cuba has contributed a number of inventions to warfare and repression. The Spaniards bred slavehunting dogs, "Cuban hounds," that were exported to the United States. Spanish generals invented the system of concentrating a rural population in garrisons and declaring anyone outside them a rebel--a tactic that the United States would employ in Vietnam as its "strategic hamlets" policy. Cuban revolutionaries refined the technique of urban terrorism...
...need another kind of criticism, because pessimistic surrender leads nowhere. Beyond the loss that the exile of men like Cabrera Infante represents, a literary portrait of Cuba should consider the entire transformation of Cuban society. An evaluation of the Cuban revolution must judge its faults in the light of its accomplishments: the extension of economic justice, the political representation of the masses, and the establishment of a new national identity...