[In the following essay, Davis offers a short introduction to the study of Cabrera Infante's work with reference to several other writers, most notably James Joyce.]

As the twentieth century draws to an uneasy close, we can begin to consider the novels, poems, movies, music, architecture, and celebrations that are its artifacts, and we are immediately struck by the persistence of memory (to steal a phrase from Dalí). As our understanding of history has become fainter, our dependence upon interior history, memory, has grown more obsessive. [Cabrera Infante] might be called the Bach of memory, and each of his texts adds variations to the central fugue. Borges, in a poem that re-creates the house of his childhood ("Androgué"), calls memory the fourth dimension, and it is into this realm that we travel with Cabrera Infante.

For those of us born into English, it is appropriate to consider Cabrera Infante in light of the prose of James Joyce. Indeed, there has been in this century a fascinating correspondence between the history, the exploration of language, and the sheer exuberance of imagination in Ireland and in Latin America. Cabrera Infante has reversed the order of Joyce's texts. He published his own Finnegans Wake in his first major novel, Tres tristes tigres. The importance of Joyce's stories in the collection Dubliners is assumed by Vista del amanecer en el trópico. Cabrera Infante's Habana para un Infante difunto presents the work that in Joyce's canon is paralleled by Ulysses. For Joyce, the only mode of entry into his world was through words, words that soared into epiphanies.

Joyce forced us to realize, for the first time in English, that prose has all the weapons in the arsenal of poetry, and he taught a whole generation of writers—Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald—to use the entire arsenal. Nowadays, we who inhabit the realms memorialized by these poets of prose are more likely to see their inheritors' work at the movies than in other written texts.

In the cultural world that arises from Spanish, Cabrera Infante reminds us of the delightful conversations between dogs in Cervantes, of Sancho's island, of the words that become dragons and windmills. Quevedo's dust is as long lasting as are the images from the movies. Cabrera Infante founds his poetry upon images no less gritty than Machado's interior country. Within Spanish America, Cabrera Infante must be considered as a member of the group of founders who insist that reality must endure a new foundation in the word itself. In Borges's Sur and in his infernal library, in García Márquez's Macondo, in Cortázar's Paris, in Fuentes's Terra Nostra the world is begun again, and each new founding rests on a shimmering surface of words.

Another Irishman, Seamus Heaney, has written a fine essay on the sense of place (included in Pre-occupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978), in which he explains:

Irrespective of our creed or politics, irrespective of what culture or subculture may have coloured our individual sensibilities, our imaginations assent to the stimulus of the names, our sense of the place is enhanced, our sense of ourselves as inhabitants not just of a geographical country but of a country of the mind is cemented. It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation. (132)

Cabrera Infante places his Havana in the heart of the universe, in Conrad's heart of darkness, and through the hypnotic speech of his characters he dares us to enter his labyrinth. His inferno constantly reminds us of another Commedia, wherein Dante was recognized in Hell itself by the Florentine accent of his voice (Heaney, 137).

As Heaney maintains: "We are no longer innocent; we are no longer just parishioners of the local. We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill of the gable…. Yet those primary laws of our nature are still operative. We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our history" (148-49).

In his memorial history Cabrera Infante gives us a priceless gift: his own island, his own Havana, his own epiphany. The joy of words exchanged among friends, sung in boleros, and transformed into images on the screen—this joy survives the tragedy of history, of change, of death itself.