Bookatlas
1929–2005Latin America
Portrait of Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Cuba

Manic wordplay and phonetic puns turn Havana nightlife into a linguistic funhouse where sound consistently outruns sense.

Cabrera Infante was born in rural Cuba to parents who helped found the country's Communist Party, and grew up first in poverty and then in Havana's film culture, working as a movie critic under a pseudonym after censors banned him from reviewing under his own name.

An early supporter of Castro's revolution, he served as a cultural attaché in Brussels before a 1965 trip home for his mother's funeral exposed him to the repression he had defended from abroad; he broke with the regime and never returned to Cuba. He wrote Three Trapped Tigers, chasing pre-revolutionary Havana nightlife through puns and transcribed voices, largely from exile in London.

He was knighted by the British crown and received the Cervantes Prize in 1997, dying in London in 2005.

The Latin American Boom

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1967
    Cover of Three Trapped Tigers
    Three Trapped Tigers
    Lvl 9postmodern

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