Word: cuban
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
While Three Trapped Tigers is hilarious, Vista del Amanecer, published in 1974, is a grimly serious book, soaked with desperate humor. It is a collection of short pieces, meditations on images in Cuban history, few of them more than a page long. Each vignette presents a static scene or a brief incident. For the colonial period, they describe engravings: conquistadores meeting Indians, bloodhounds catching a runaway slave. For modern times, many of them comment on photographs: a revolutionary commander, terrorists dead in a ditch. At worst, these pieces resemble Reader's Digest fillers, but at their best they are epiphanies...
...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...
CABRERA ATTACKS the Cuban revolution simply by painting it with the same colors that he uses for any other tyranny. He tells of a waiter turned terrorist who becomes a police interrogator and lives in a confiscated mansion. He recalls famous 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 case that the book builds is guilt by association: the Cuban revolution rose out of a tradition of violence and has perpetuated...