Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Novelist, critic, essayist, journalist, and film screenwriter. Cervantes Prize for the Spanish Language. One of the unavoidable figures in Cuban literature of the second half of the twentieth century.

In 1941 he moved with his family to La Habana and there he began to write, which is why he abandoned his studies in Medicine and began to work in various trades, entering in 1950 the School of Journalism of Cuba.

In 1951 he founded the Cinemateca de Cuba together with Néstor Almendros and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and directed it until 1956. He worked as a film critic under the pseudonym G. Caín starting in 1954, in the weekly Carteles, of which three years later he was editor-in-chief. In 1959, following the political change in Cuba, he was appointed director of the National Council of Culture and, at the same time, subdirector of the newspaper Revolución. Shortly after he became director of the Cuban cultural magazine Lunes de revolución, from its founding until its closure in 1961.

During the first government of Fidel Castro (1962-1965) he was sent to Brussels as cultural attaché and also as chargé d'affaires, but his disagreements with the new government reached their maximum point in 1968, when he granted an interview to the Argentine magazine Primera Plana criticizing the Cuban regime; this provokes a strong reaction in Cuba that leads him to abandon his diplomatic position. He spent some time in Madrid and, later, requested political asylum in England where he became naturalized, settling his residence in Londres.

The whole of his work is a kind of "collage" of pre-revolutionary La Habana, as well as a synthesis of the author's ideology; he considers that commitment is not indispensable for making critical literature and that, under certain conditions, aesthetic enjoyment also serves to question established powers.

Eroticism is present throughout his work, but always "in function of parody and laughter, something that an erotic author would never do," according to what he himself says. Film being what attracts and drives him at the beginning of his cultural and journalistic activity, he goes to Hollywood and becomes the first Latin American screenwriter, with titles such as Punto de fuga and Wonderwall. He also serves as a professor at the universities of Virginia and West Virginia and lecturer at other American universities, such as Oklahoma.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante evidenced his passion for cinema from his earliest critical writings, published in the magazine Carteles in 1954 and later collected in the volume Un oficio del siglo XX (1973), where he composes a sort of imaginary biography of the critic G. Caín, alter ego of the author himself. Likewise, other compilations of articles or essays on cinema can be cited, such as Arcadia todas las noches (1978), where some lectures appear that he gave in La Habana on filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston or Vicent Minnelli; or such as Cine o sardina (1997), with which it reaches four editions in only four months of being published.

Beyond cinema or popular music, the history of Cuba is another of the frequent themes in the essayistic and critical work of Cabrera Infante. In that sense, the texts collected in Mea Cuba (1992) constitute an exaltation of exile and an exercise of memory, since in them he reinvents his native country from a distance and from his own political ideas.

In Holy Smoke (1985) –later translated to Spanish under the title of Puro humo (2000)– he develops the autobiographical account of an addicted smoker and offers a catalog of films, actors and songs where smoke and the cigar have a leading presence. Among this area of Cabrera Infante's work, some works of an experimental character also stand out, such as O (1975) and Exorcismos de esti(l)o (1976), composed from fragments or narrative miscelláneas impossible to classify according to narrow limits of the narrative or the essayistic. In general sense the works of Cabrera Infante contaminate prose genres such as chronicle, criticism, essay, autobiography, vignette, story, short story or novel.

The first narrative volume of Guillermo Cabrera Infante is titled Así en la paz como en la guerra (1960), and brings together several vignettes of the struggle against Batista as well as stories that recreate the life of pre-revolutionary La Habana. However, international recognition as a narrator he would conquer starting in 1964 with his first novel, with which he obtained the Biblioteca Breve Prize, from Seix Barral. Published later under the title of Tres tristes tigres (1967), this work recreates the experiences of a group of heterogeneous young people in the nighttime atmosphere of the Havana bars of 1958. In addition to the city as a fundamental setting, in his first novel other concerns also stand out that later will be repeated in the narrative work of Cabrera Infante. Such is the case of sophisticated narrative structures, formed from voices and discourses of the most diverse origin; the self-reflexive character of literary work and the parody of its own procedures; as well as the numerous verbal games that are also fed by his interest in various linguistic questions. Thus, in his works the use of anagrams, palindromes, paradoxes, hyperboles, typographical errors, pastiches and all kinds of verbal juggling is frequent; as well as the interest in reproducing the living speech of the most disparate linguistic norms that converge in La Habana of his memories, such as jazz jargon, popular speech or the speech of the petty bourgeoisie. In La Habana para un infante difunto (1979) –considered by many as an erotic novel– Cabrera Infante also insists on a narrative of autobiographical content where the capital, the history and the speech of his native country become thematic centers, and where a narrative style is strengthened formed from parody, mockery, marks of orality, verbal pranks and intertextuality. As a continuation of his obsessions Cabrera Infante also writes several books of stories and tales, as well as a last novel titled Ella cantaba boleros (1996), where he recovers and enriches some of the stories from Tres tristes tigres.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was one of the first Latin American screenwriters to successfully insert himself in Hollywood, where he traveled in 1970 for the filming of Vanishing point, a road movie that obtained great box office success. Previously, and with less success, he had already written the script for the film Wonderwall (1967), later enriched by the music of George Harrison. He also participates in other cinematographic projects, such as the adaptation for Joseph Losey of a novel by Malcolm Lowry titled Under the volcano –the homonymous script, finished in 1972, was never filmed–; or the writing of the script that gave rise to La ciudad perdida (2005), set in Cuba and directed by Andy García.