[In the following excerpt, Schwartz describes vignettes in View of Dawn in the Tropics as imaginative and experimental, and provides an overview of the collection.]

Cabrera Infante's latest novel, View of Dawn in the Tropics, is experimental, but is absolutely nothing like his first in style, form, rhythm, size, or characterization. View is a shorter work, only 141 pages, consisting mainly of a series of small, ironic sketches tracing Cuban history from its earliest times to our own. It contains none of the linguistic pyrotechnics (palindromes, anagrams, etc.), the black (or white) pages, diagrams, drawings, parodies, visual poems, and confusing narrative voices of its predecessor. View is a somber work, a serious experience, a sobering jolt after TTT [Three Trapped Tigers]. It contains 103 sections narrated by a single voice (probably Cabrera Infante himself) on history, geography, war, death, and escape. It represents a serious condemnation of Castro's regime.

The series of vignettes contain many cinematic devices. The single unifying pose of the sometimes-elusive narrator is his insistence upon looking at old photographs and interpreting them for us. His reminisences about the wars of 1868, 1898, and 1959 are conceived in cinematic freeze frames that describe a series of usually unidentified protagonists (with one single exception) with the rank of commandant, captain, doctor, or rebel. The length, size, and cinematic style of the sketches are of varying quality, and there are only four literary liaisons or unifying elements between two or three of the 103 vignettes.

The longest entry is a mother's monologue described as a telephone call to the author about the death of her son Pedro Luis Boitel, who died for Cuba under the cruelties of the Castro regime. Cabrera Infante's sketches are, according to the book's dust jacket, “contemporary—vivid and sharp, sometimes cruel and violent, sometimes witty, sometimes sad, frequently deeply ironical, … a personal statement of the strategies of history.”¹View portrays presidents, generals, soldiers, blacks, Spaniards, Americans, rebels, and invaders and reveals the cruelties, hypocrisies, and tragedies that have washed over Cuban soil throughout the centuries. It is Cabrera Infante's sardonic humor, combined with his irresistible, remarkable choice of detail, his ability to pinpoint events without identifying them, that makes his “experimental” View intriguing, bitterly amusing, and ultimately quite moving as he traverses the centuries of madness of human inhumanity.

One critic viewed the book as the author's attempt “to elevate to myth his central theme, Cuba … to stop time and capture the elusive moment and endow it with a certain permanence, creating a new form, the ministory or micronarrative, or perhaps even a poem in prose, counterpointing two realities—the photographic with the real, and saw View as an exile's condemnation or vindication of his earlier pro-Castro series of short stories In Peace as in War.”²

As the book begins, we witness the creation of the island of Cuba at the dawn of time; we go through the exploration, exploitation, and evangelization phases of colonization, aware of the heavy impact of Spain and the dark side of the Spanish character, its injustices, brutalities, and cruelties against the Cuban people. We pass through epochs of slavery (stylized similarly to the television documentary Roots), as rebellion against Spain bloodies the island. Early on, Cabrera Infante is making an anti-war plea, demonstrating with continual heavy-handed irony how even the author of Cuba's National Anthem was put to death, how the poets and artists (much like us) died at the hands of a military that is also perceived as “accidentally” heroic. There are bloodbaths of Haitian and Jamaican workers and gangster massacres, Cuban-style. On two occasions Cabrera describes events that were the plots of major Hollywood films, John Huston's We Were Strangers (digging through a cemetery to assassinate a dictator) and Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (describing the “lyrical” death of a rebel by stray bullets from a comrade's rifle as he reaches up to pick a mango). Cabrera's cinematic sense never fails him.

Certain vignettes are elevated to allegorical proportions: a man being chased by “Tyranny,” how “Death” took the “Others.” We witness women losing their entire family, wiping away their tears, and continuing to do their daily wash. Death indeed is a natural part of life in Cuba. We see soldiers machine-gunning mobs of people gathered in front of a national palace by a dictator supposedly to witness his abdication. We view many treacheries and cruelties: young boys single-handedly killing police lieutenants and then handed over to the police by rebel leaders afraid of further retribution; seven men machine-gunned one by one as they leave their cover, giving themselves up to police; the coup de grâce given men after being executed on Christmas Eve. But Cabrera Infante lyrically elevates these last moments of the victims; for example: “Before dying, did the last hostage think he was dreaming?” (p. 70), or “He fell to one side and rolled from the tree down toward the ravine. What was he thinking? Someone once said that we never know what the brave man thinks” (p. 99).

Cabrera Infante graphically describes the ugliness of death, for example, in the comical episode of a homosexual recaught by the police after he had tricked them previously, “found a week later in the gutter. They had cut off his tongue and stuck it in his anus” (p. 78). Or, “… the doctor took out a fistful of feces and among them, shining in the sun, six, ten, twelve sharp little gray pieces of schrapnel: a splinter had hit him, splitting up in the intestinal cavity as it entered, forming a shower of swift razors which perforated his intestines and burst his liver” (p. 92).

Cabrera's intent was to write a serious anti-war novel, with occasional seriocomic glimpses into the Cuban character. He documents, for example, attempted assassinations that were successful on paper but disastrous in execution: ironically, “in the beauty of the gesture, destiny had brought together heroism and failure” (p. 87). He repeatedly demonstrates how the spontaneous act (of escape, for example) is more successful than the well-planned plot.

View of Dawn in the Tropics is chock-full of imagery—soldiers lying dead with holes in their necks, bloody faces in a bucolic setting, ironically compared with Renoir's Picnique sur l'Herbe; photographs that reveal “the image of the dead hero when alive” (p. 119); lyrical images of death: “… the volley or the single shot wasn't heard but the impact is left and he will fall as long as man exists and they will see him falling when eyes look at him and they will not forget him as long as there is memory” (p. 115); “… his gray arm, next to the pale gray chest with the black satin, falling on the black grass, leaning toward the black earth and death forever …” (p. 115).

One incredible story, elevated to the level of parable, demonstrates the dark side of the Cuban character. A father, seeking to correct the nocturnal carousing habits of his son asks his friend, the local Chief of Police, to arrest the boy for a single night. However, fate intervenes, and the Police Chief is killed that evening by a bomb. In retaliation, the police choose ten political prisoners to be killed—and the boy is among them. Although entertaining as a story, Cabrera Infante implies much more about the Cuban mind, its penchant for practical jokes and cruelties, and the tenuous role fate plays in life and death. He also criticizes the Cuban fetish for machismo, having some of his fictional characters liken themselves to bullfighters. The revolution of 1959 was successful in one sense; it changed the Cuban's attitude toward machismo. Ballet dancer Jorge Esquivel recently recalled the time when “people said they'd rather see their sons clean streets than be a ballet dancer. After the Revolution, Fidel went to see Alicia [Alonso], and was so impressed by her that he decided to help her build a ballet company in Cuba.”³ In the main, however, View of Dawn in the Tropics is an anti-Cuban, anti-Castro work.

In a somewhat autobiographical section, sprinkled with imaginative details, Cabrera Infante recalls how they “took my little theatre away from me” (p. 133); the perils of “nationalization”; his own experiences cutting sugar cane; an infection that led him to be sent home, eventually to flee the country. But his most biting critique of Cuba is his description of the death, after twelve years in prison, of Pedro Luis Boitel, a student leader who “conspired against the powers of the state.” Here Cabrera Infante takes pot shots at the ineffectiveness of such international organizations as the Red Cross, the OAS, the Commission on Human Rights, as well as of Cubans themselves: “Not a single voice was raised, nothing was said, nobody said a thing to get them to give him medical care … not even the Pope … because never has there been a Cuban, the God's honest truth, who has sacrificed himself for this country …” (pp. 136-137).

View of Dawn in the Tropics is an ironic book. It describes what is really hidden under the exotic beauty of the Cuban landscape. The dust cover carries the picture of a crocodile ready to bite. View is a diatribe against war, against all sorts of tyrannies that are antithetical to the natural Cuban way of life. Or is the real Cuban way of life so full of hypocrisy, guile, injustice, political schemes, see-saw skirmishes over the centuries always ending in petty dictatorships and eventual death? People and plots are the real enemies, says Cabrera Infante. The author depicts nature, not nostalgically but as an impersonal entity, immutable, unchanging, a mute spectator:

And it will always be there. As someone once said, that long, sad, unfortunate island will be there after the last Indian and after the last Spaniard and after the last African and after the last American and after the last Cubans, surviving all disasters, eternally washed over by the Gulf stream: beautiful and green, undying and eternal (p. 141).

Certainly, Mario Vargas Llosa would be pleased by Cabrera Infante's latest direction in his pursuit of perpetuating his narrative skill and his imaginative use of storytelling techniques.

Notes

1. G. Cabrera Infante, View of Dawn in the Tropics, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: Harper, 1978), dust jacket.

2. Julio Hernández-Miyares, “Cabrera Infante: A Tiger in the Tropics,” Unpublished paper, February 15, 1977.

3. Michael Robertson, “A Cuban Ballet Star Who Cuts Sugar Cane,” New York Times (July 15, 1979), pp. 19, 24.