Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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View of Dawn in the Tropics

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In the following review, Rankin highlights the poignant qualities of the tales in View of Dawn in the Tropics. View of Dawn in the Tropics is a brief and poignant history of Cuba, related in 117 sections. These vignettes, fables and snapshot descriptions vary in length from a paragraph to four pages, and their first lines are logged in the index as if they were prose poems. This post-modern technique of making a history from a mosaic of fragments has been employed by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano in his epic trilogy Memory of Fire, but in G. Cabrera Infante's hands the method is also reminiscent of the Extraordinary Tales collated by the Argentines, Borges and Bioy Casares. Here factual history is worn down into fictive myth; the clutter of names and dates and elaborate particularity have been polished away to leave emblematic figures such as 'the black general', 'the old soldier' and 'the comandante', whose violent fates are laconically described.
SOURCE: A review of View of Dawn in the Tropics in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4477, January 20-26, 1989, p. 54.

[In the following review, Rankin highlights the poignant qualities of the tales in View of Dawn in the Tropics.]

Key to the book is the first word of the title. As one would expect from this pun-loving writer, "view" has several meanings. In the sense of "opinion", the exiled Cabrera Infante's view of his native land since Fidel Castro took power thirty years ago is clear: Cuba is a tyrannical dictatorship, a black joke far from any "dawn" of progressive enlightenment. Many of the vignettes are distanced by a cool style ("the senator was eating bread when they killed him, and his white linen suit was stained with blood and spilled coffee") which pretends to objectivity. Other sketches are already at one remove, being verbal descriptions of scenes depicted in other media: engravings, a map, photographs, a film. It is an exile's perspective, contemplating the leaves of a scrap-book of oppression and failed revolutions. And in the long view of Cuba's dire history—colonization by great powers, massacre of Indians, enslaving of blacks—the latest régime, with its persecution of dissidents and homosexuals, is regarded as quite consonant with what has gone on before.

The tone of the book does change, however, as chronology brings us up to date. The dead bodies and the gaol-bars become more bitterly personal than ironically picturesque. Three of the last nine vignettes have first-person narrators: a fugitive on a plank-and-tyre raft; a hungry convict in a labour camp; and a "disappeared" prisoner's mother raging with grief. The book is dedicated to one man who was shot by a firing squad and to another who shot himself.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante is perhaps the only naturalized British author who writes in Spanish. Vista del amanecer en el tropico, originally published in 1974, is here translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, but has been revised by the author. His hand is apparent in the English puns ("a joke is closer to a yoke than you think"), but they are fewer and less laboured than usual; appropriate to a book about a land which appears more sombre than sunny:

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 Russian and after the last of the Cubans, surviving all disasters, eternally washed over by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal.

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