Miriam Gomez and Guillermo Cabrera Infante by Nestor Almendros

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was born on April 22, 1929, in Gibara, a small town on the northern coast of the Cuban province of Oriente—also the birthplace of Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro. Because his parents were members of the Communist Party, the family was obliged to move to Havana in 1941. He grew up with a double interest: literature and cinema. In 1947, he published his first story and in 1951 he founded the Cinemateca de Cuba. Briefly jailed in 1952 for publishing a tale containing English profanities, he had to write under a pseudonym: G. Cain.

Cain became Cuba’s best-known film critic. In 1957, he took part in underground, anti-Batista activities. When Batista abdicated (December 31, 1958), he worked on the newspaper Revolución, as editor of the Monday literary supplement. He traveled in the entourage of Fidel Castro through the U.S. and Latin America. In 1960, he published his first book of stories, As in Peace, So in War. By 1961, his relation with the Castro government had soured: Lunes, the literary supplement, was banned. He was named cultural attaché in Brussels in 1962, the same year G. Cain published his collected film reviews (with a preface by G. Cabrera Infante).

The manuscript version of Three Trapped Tigers was nominated for the Prix Formentor in 1965. That same year Cabrera Infante returned to Havana for his mother’s funeral and left Cuba forever on October 3. He remained in Madrid until October of 1966, when he moved to London, where he lives today.

His publications available in English include: Three Trapped Tigers (1971), View of Dawn in the Tropics (1978), the essay “Bites From the Bearded Crocodile” (London Review of Books, June 1981). His most recent novel, La Habana para un infante difunto (1979), is currently being translated with the provisional title Infante’s Inferno.

This interview took place in 1982, during the spring semester at the University of Virginia, where Cabrera Infante was a visiting professor. It was conducted in the living room of the house Cabrera Infante and his wife of twenty-one years, the actress Miriam Gómez, had rented for the semester—a charming, yellow, mock-Georgian home that belongs to an English professor. It is decorated in a loosely eighteenth-century style, and contains a large collection of books, mostly by eighteenth-century-style British authors.

Cabrera Infante, a devotee of small work spaces, himself a smallish person, works upstairs in a tiny, untidy study adjacent to the master bedroom. When he is not writing or talking on the telephone, he birdwatches, joining Miriam Gómez, binoculars and Peterson Guide in hand among the trees surrounding the house, or peruses tv Guide in pursuit of old movies.

The high-ceilinged living room where we talk is decorated with prints of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. Outside, a subject of great interest to Naso, the family cat, are large numbers of cardinals, robins, and starlings gathered to eat the seeds Miriam Gómez has scattered for them—her desire to feed and watch birds in conflict with her love for cats. Above the sofa where Cabrera Infante sits, Hogarth’s women crowd around the drunken Rake and provide a curious counterpoint to the interview: their silent brawling mocks our supposedly genteel conversation.

INTERVIEWER

How do you write?

GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE

Do you mean the position I assume at the desk?

INTERVIEWER

No, no. I mean your writing habits.

CABRERA INFANTE

In fact I don’t really write all that much. I type. Nowadays I type on my brand-new Praxis 35, an Olivetti made in Japan—the old Rome-Tokyo axis now become a merger. The problem is that this typewriter, instead of becoming unruly like all my old typewriters and old girlfriends, started out imitating my wife, Miriam Gómez, by trying to do my thinking for me. It’s like living in a totalitarian state. No wonder they named it Praxis. That’s what Marxists call “thought in action.” Praxis may make perfect for them, but not for me.

INTERVIEWER

Do you jot down notes on the typewriter too?

CABRERA INFANTE

I used to, but the notes became pages and sometimes short stories. I write down notes in my acromegalic handwriting, with letters as big as fingers on a small pocket notebook or on steno pads, which I keep everywhere—on my desk, my night table, in the kitchen. Steno pads should have a better name . . .

INTERVIEWER

What better name could they have?

CABRERA INFANTE

Sterno pads. In honor of Laurence Sterne, digressor.

INTERVIEWER

Sterne? Lots of critics—to say nothing of students forced to read him—attack him because of his digressions.

CABRERA INFANTE

I don’t have to defend Sterne; he is his own defense, the Sterne line. And I certainly agree when he says that “digressions are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading.”

INTERVIEWER

Swift was no less devoted to digression than Sterne. What do you think of him?

CABRERA INFANTE

The digressor as aggressor. The difference is that Swift was all saeva indignatio and that savage indignation was the motor of all his writings. You couldn’t find a less playful writer among his contemporaries. Compared to Swift, Pope was a stand-up comedian.

INTERVIEWER

You seem to have an affinity for English eighteenth-century satire—something people might not expect from a Cuban writer. How do you understand satire, as a literary genre?

CABRERA INFANTE

Look, my friend, who knows what to expect from a Cuban writer, or any writer anywhere? Why not Sterne and Swift? Or Armor and Swift? At best, satire is didactic. At worst, political. This means that satires are not ludic or playful but just the opposite. They are the play wherein the satirist catches the conscience of the audience, which is why they are so closely related to sermons, religious tracts, and political pamphlets. Personally, I feel closer to Swift’s motto, Vive la bagatelle, than to his epitaph. Long live trivia! Where he and I part company is the grave, where his satire is most serious, and where I would rather turn that bagatelle into “bag-a-Stella.” Swift wanted to use satire, literature, “to mend the World.” To me this makes writing, which should be an end in itself—literature—into something political. Any literary work that aspires to the condition of art must forget politics, religion, and, ultimately, morals. Otherwise it will be a pamphlet, a sermon, or a morality play. Even the greatest moralist of our century, Joseph Conrad, was first and foremost an entertainer.

INTERVIEWER

What would you say about Solzhenitsyn?

CABRERA INFANTE

Solzhenitsyn is a failed artist but a very successful moralist. His novels are pretentious junk, but his political writing, The Gulag Archipelago books for example, are precious masterpieces of indictment.