No silencing a boom voice

When I heard of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s death on Feb. 21, many images flashed before me. Some of Guillermo himself but mostly of scenes from “Three Trapped Tigers” and the liquid Havana nights he brought to life in his fiction. His death closes a long love affair between the man and that city by the sea. Indeed, literature loses one of its most distinguished representatives.

Born in Cuba in 1929 and exiled for four decades, Cabrera Infante joined the select group of writers that became known as the Latin American Boom in the 1960s. Earlier, he had earned a reputation as an incisive film critic under the pen name of Cain (combining the first two syllables of his two last names), which he used to evade censorship under Batista. After the Castro takeover, Cabrera Infante filled a number of cultural posts in the new government, the most important of which was editor of Lunes de Revolucion, the cultural magazine of the fledgling regime’s official newspaper. His first volume of short stories, “In War as It Is in Peace,” chronicled the violence of the struggle against Batista. An admirer of Hemingway, Joyce and Lewis Carroll, Cabrera Infante ran into trouble for defending publicly a short about Havana’s nightlife made by his brother “Saba” and Orlando Jimenez Leal. For Cain and for independent writers and filmmakers, that confrontation spelled the beginning of the end. His magazine was shut down and Cabrera Infante was sent into limbo as a cultural attache in Belgium. It was then he wrote the first version of “Three Trapped Tigers,” his undisputed masterpiece, which in 1964 won the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize in Spain.

The uniqueness of “Three Trapped Tiger’s” language and its ribald sense of humor combined the playful Cuban ethos (known as “choteo”) with inventive punning and parody. The book celebrated late 1950s Havana, by then a mere memory, and gave a monumental portrayal of Havana as a modern city, a herculean attempt to re-create the many cultural strands that make up the Cuban character.

But beyond its dazzling facade, “Three Trapped Tigers” also offers a glimpse of characters possessing a passion for living and a love of betrayal: Gloria, the flashy, fleshy mulatto packaged for external consumption; Estrella, the poor, dark-skinned bolero singer who has renounced humility; Eribo, the commercial artist cum conga player, fatally attracted to a white upper-class Cuban beauty; and a host of others who arrive from the provinces in search of a better life. The book seduces us with its verbal pyrotechnics. Though it gives us cool nights at Tropicano, it also thrusts us into the searing heat of poverty.

In 1968, Cabrera Infante publicly broke with Castro and the regime. At a time when the Cuban revolution was at its peak and Che Guevara became an icon of the romantic 1960s, the break rippled through the ranks of the Latin American intelligentsia and left rancor in its wake. The young Cabrera Infante battled depression (he was diagnosed as bipolar), public hostility and ostracism. Out of that struggle came “View of Dawn in the Tropics,” a book of historical vignettes on Cuba’s recurring violence written in a subdued, poetic language -- history in a minor key that is also an histoire a clef. “View of Dawn in the Tropics” was followed by “Infante’s Inferno,” an erotic autobiographical novel about coming of age in Havana in which, to put it in the author’s own puns, rather than “hit or miss,” he goes for “heat or myth.”

Cabrera Infante crisscrossed genres with a convert’s fervor, holding to the notion that anything could be an art form, even film reviews that he invariably turned, according to Mario Vargas Llosa, into a literary genre. He also explored cultural and political subjects in entertaining narratives such as “Holy Smoke,” a history of cigars that puffs its irreverent way from the lore of native Cubans to those of Groucho Marx. His most controversial volume, “Mea Cuba,” is a collection of diverse political essays about the Cuban scene including the tradition of suicide in Cuban history, the parallel lives of gay writers inside and outside the closet, and the historical invisibility of Cuban exiles -- invisible because outsiders, including other exiles, refuse to see them.

Cabrera Infante was one of the first writers to tap the potential of popular culture in Spanish and to bring it in line with “serious” literary works. He was one of the first boom voices to make us crack up, and above all, he was a master of language, exploding words in several directions, whipping them into carnival performances through the fury of their sounds. Cabrera Infante, like Jorge Luis Borges, created a personal style: But whereas Borges worked to reduce language to metaphor -- making long stories short -- Cabrera Infante labored to belabor the point, twisting and pulling language in many ways.

Literature has lost a master craftsman who put Havana on the literary map with a bang, who fueled the current nostalgia for a lost city, who turned the task of film reviewing into an art form, turned the rhythms of Cuban Spanish into an exquisite world of words. Though newspapers all over have carried lengthy obits that chronicle his achievements, there’s been only silence in the official Cuban media. Such invisibility cannot silence his voice. “Distance,” so goes a bolero Guillermo used to love, “means forgetting.” But Cabrera Infante knew how to turn that distance into a verbal caress. He gave entire generations a vision of a city that is no more, at least no more in the way he lived it. My own epitaph would thus read: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Writer of Havana, Citizen of the Word. *