MADRID, Spain.- On April 22, 1929, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, one of the most important Cuban writers of the 20th century, was born in Gibara, Cuba. only his novels Three sad tigers Y Havana for a deceased infant They would already be enough to exalt him within the history of Cuban literature. However, he is one of the authors prohibited for the regime.
Cabrera Infante moved to Havana in 1941. In 1950 he began studying journalism and the following year he founded the Cinemateca de Cuba together with Néstor Almendros and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.
In 1959 he directs the publication Revolution Monday, but at that time he began to be accused of “wanting to take revolutionary culture for himself” and was sent to Brussels in 1962 as a cultural attaché at the Cuban Embassy.
When traveling to Cuba in 1965 for the death of his mother, he was investigated and detained for four months, so he had no choice but to go into exile in Spain, from where he would move to London, where he lived until his death in 2005. .
In 1967 he published one of his masterpieces, Three sad tigersin which he recounts the nightlife of three young people in Havana in 1958. The novel was considered counterrevolutionary by the Cuban authorities, who expelled him from the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.
According to explained In an interview with EFE, his widow, Miriam Gómez, “Guillermo would have a lot of fun seeing what is happening in Cuba,” referring to “that Cubans, after sixty years of indoctrination in hatred of Americans, believe that their only salvation is are the United States is a real failure for the Castro regime”.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante received the Cervantes Prize in 1997 and the Cristóbal Gabarrón Foundation International Prize in 2003.
Despite the censorship of the regime, as the philosopher and writer Fernando Savater would summarize: “Never has the Island, nor, above all, Havana been celebrated in literature with greater love, with more heartbreaking nostalgia and with better knowledge.”
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