Word: havana
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What is all but incredible about this dizzying slapstick is not that the author has the worst case of the Marx blathers on record, but that he is a Cuban, and wrote it all first in Spanish. His novel, a brilliantly loony memoir of life in Havana just before Castro's takeover, was called Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers) in the original. When Cabrera Infante and a couple of steady-nerved friends did the English transmogrification of TTT, the tongue twisting of the title seemed more important than its negligible sense, and so the tigers were trapped...
...reader who does not resist the flow absorbs a sense of Havana at the end of Batista's reign: overripe, tainted, almost innocent. The time is generally city-night in Cabrera Infante's narrations. The punning speakers are young dementia peacocks: an actor, a photographer, an assortment of nightclub chicks. They drink, flirt, gossip, listen to music, flip tag lines from American movies at each other...
...Cuban naval offensive has been directed at solely Babun-owned ships. But Radio Havana warned that Cuban gunboats would have no compunction whatsoever about seizing any vessel "under any flag or camouflage" that they believed had been engaged in "counterrevolutionary activities...
...spirit flared as he read that three gunmen from Nicaragua had hijacked a Nicaraguan BAC 1-11 with 40 passengers and six crew members aboard. The plane had just made an unscheduled landing at San José airport. Would the President authorize refueling it for the flight on to Havana, or providing a new plane for the trip? "To hell with this!" exclaimed Don Pepe. "No damn plane and no damn deal...
...Rapidez, one of the most sought-after trainers in Latin America, knows all about thoroughbreds. Born Alfredo Cruz in Matanzas, Cuba, he quit school in the third grade and at age 13 went to Havana, where his quick hands won him the name Kid Rapidez and the Cuban flyweight title. After losing only eight of nearly 200 fights, the Kid retired and became a trainer at Havana's National Academy of Boxing. There he groomed such classy fighters as former Welterweight Champions Luis Rodriguez and the late Benny ("Kid") Paret. When Fidel Castro banned professional sports in Cuba, Rapidez...