GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE (1929–2005) was born in Cuba and went into exile in London in 1965. He was a film critic, essayist, journalist, translator, and writer. His novels include Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers), which was nominated for a Prix Formentor; View of Dawn in the Tropics; and Infante’s Inferno.
OSCAR HIJUELOS (1951–2013) was born in New York City. He was the author of several novels, including The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which was adapted into a movie and a musical; Our House in the Last World, winner of the Rome Prize; and Dark Duke. He was the winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, and the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. He was Professor and Writer-in-Residence at Duke University.
OSCAR HIJUELOS When you were a child in Cuba what were your first exposures to the notion of narrative?
GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE As a child I was exposed to the narratives of the movies. But the funnies (or monitos as they were called; in Havana we called them muñequitos) were as important—if not more so. The radio came later, where I heard a series of episodes or comedy programs. I was, by the way, the only one of my friends and/or classmates who read the funnies or could tell the difference between the movies and the serials. From the comic books in Havana I learned that a strip could be a trip, as in The Spirit, where Will Eisner’s heroes were always dressed in blue (blue suits, blue felt hat, blue gloves) and had a sidekick who was a black boy, called Ebony in Cuba as in Ebony Concerto. Serials like The Three Daredevils of the Red Circle (the titles are approximations of the Spanish ones) were exercises in waiting for the Coming Attractions. It is rather baffling—at least to me—that there were more thrills in the funnies than in the movies. I taught myself to read by deciphering the inscriptions in the balloons because my father or my mother was fed up with my insistence on instant gratification by translation. They were all, as it should be, forms of popular art more pertinent than literature then.
OH Were you fascinated by the story content of old Cuban songs?
GI Cuban songs, or rather, boleros, were more important when the tunes carried a message. I became intrigued about what the lyrics could mean that made people sing almost in unison, “Voy por la vereda tropical!” But the first phrase that conveyed any meaning for me, of all things, came from a movie—some sort of appreciation expressed by Paul Muni in Scarface every time he encountered something that for him was tempting and therefore meant what I later knew was called class. The phrase, which I learned through repetition, was “Expensive, eh?”—more menacing than a direct threat.
OH Can you remember the first time that you were conscious of seeing your name written, as a child?
GI My name was a source of embarrassment, as my father had the grand idea of giving me the first name at home, of “Junior.” In school, Cabrera, my second name became my first. And all because my father was my namesake and nobody was called Guillermo. Within my family I was called Guillermito.
OH Did you know any writers and were there books in your house?
GI There were books around when I was a boy as my father inherited all the books from my great-uncle, Tío Matías’s library; he was sort of an intellectual who wrote in one of my hometown afternoon newspapers called El Gibareña, under the nom de plume Sócrates. He was a great influence on my father’s life, whom he almost adopted when an awful tragedy made him an orphan. My paternal grandfather killed his wife, Tío Matías’s sister, and then he shot himself. My father was only two years old at the time and was raised by his older sister and by my great-grandmother, a terrible tyrant of a woman. It was inevitable that my father would be a communist who in turn made of my mother another communist—though she was educated in a convent. She used to have at home a lithograph of a bleeding Jesus next to a colored photograph of bloody Joseph Stalin! With such knowledge, what forgiveness? My great-grandfather and my great-grandmother on my mother’s side were avid readers of at least two national newspapers. A godsend, for those papers had a supplement of funnies on Saturday and Sunday with Tarzan, Smilin’ Jack, and last and not least, Dick Tracy, which also appeared during the week but not in color, as the X-9 Adventures. I was reading Dashiell Hammett without knowing it. On Sundays there was Prince Valiant and the original Tarzan in color drawn by the incredible Hogarth, no kin to the English master and illustrator of Tristram Shandy. My father had the first byline in the family: he was a columnist and typographer for El Triunfo, the other (town) newspaper. He was then also the clandestine responsible for the propaganda of the Communist party—which proved his undoing. Both my father and mother were taken to jail in Santiago de Cuba, and my brother and I were left in the custody of my maternal grandmother. Six months later, they were released for lack of evidence that they were dealing in clandestine propaganda against the Batista regime, then in power for the first time. Nevertheless, two years later they were helping Batista become the legal president—on party orders. That should have been a lesson to them, but it was an unforgettable memory for me. When my father and mother came back from prison, my father was without a job and my mother had to begin working at home as a lace-maker. Two years later we emigrated to Havana, where my father worked as a journalist for Hoy, the communist sheet—a legal newspaper with Batista’s blessing. The funniest thing is that Hoy came on Sundays with Superman as a feature funny based more on Nietzsche than on Marx! I didn’t start to write and have a short story published in Cuba’s leading weekly magazine until seven years later with my name suffering a sea change as I had to call myself Guillermo C. Infante.
OH Was there an author, long dead, who you would have liked to meet?
GI I wanted to meet Cervantes, and I did. My speech of acceptance was, in fact, a dinner date with Don Miguel himself. I could see, from my vantage point, King Juan Carlos of Spain shaking his head in disbelief. (Earlier, he had put around my neck a medal with the writer’s effigy.) But the joke was on me. How dare this uncouth Cuban talk to Cervantes himself?
OH Did you have a favorite movie actor?
GI For a time I believed that Marlon Brando was the best actor I’d ever seen. But of course my favorite actor had to be the cigar smoking, gun-toting and dangerous Edward G. Robinson. I became a sedulous ape, cigar and all. My moment came during the Barcelona Film Festival when the director sat me next to the former Mrs. Robinson. She asked for it. She said to me: “You remind me of Eddy.” And I said, “Who, Eddie Fisher?” She was aghast. Cigars are the best reminders.
OH As your books are filled with puns and word plays, I am wondering who the first punster in your life might have been?
GI My English teacher, Emilio González, was a master punster. No sooner had I taken my seat than he was engaging me in a spelling match and asking me to spell or not to expel or be expelled. He also concocted anagrams in Spanish, as when he asked for la peneta para el patroceto, meaning a quarter (a peseta) for el patronato (school fees).
OH Why is it that while reading Three Trapped Tigers I sometimes thought of the writer James M. Cain? Am I imagining that you were intrigued by the more emphatic elements in his work? In any event, what did the works of Cain and other American writers do for you, if anything?
GI As usual I saw the movie before I read the book. One of the reasons I read it was that I was looking for a gorgeous facsimile of Lana Turner in its pages. But she was not there of course. I admired Double Identity (that’s how my typewriter spells “indemnity”) because of Barbara Stanwyck. To watch her coming downstairs and see first her ankles and then her legs. As she wore an anklet on one of them, it was a lesson not in anatomy, but in eroticism. As you know, an anklet is called an esclava in Spanish and I became myself a slave of hers. It was, literally, my first erotic experience in a movie—but not in a moviehouse. At the time I didn’t care for directors or actresses—called actors nowadays. I found a new kind of eroticism in other books, other writers. Like Erskine Caldwell with his white trash stories or the Faulkner of Sanctuary with wicked Popeye letting Temple Drake have it with a corncob. Yes, Old Cuthbert made me do it: I read The Wild Palms before I could spell Yoknapatawpha. Here it was Borges who made me do it. Or rather his translation of The Wild Palms with a better title, Les plameras salvajes, and a better prose. (Borges would say that I improved the novel by reading it.) After reading Palms I searched for all the novels of Faulkner translated into Spanish—or rather into the Argentine idioms that I then retranslated into Cuban. (As you know God’s Little Acre became La chacrita de Dios before I translated chacrita as la finquita when it really meant la pequeña parcela.) Then I discovered Signet Books, where all Faulkner was published in paperback and then Cain came along, not as brutal as Faulkner but more eroticizing. Especially when Cora asks her lover, that is me, the reader, to bite her, to beat her—and I am quoting from a distant memory. But it was all there, on the printed page and it was, like Hugo would have said, “un frisson nouveau.”
OH Did you, if memory serves me correctly, write movie reviews for Carteles, under the pseudonym Cain?
GI I used this pseudonym, among others, because I had been put in prison sometime before for writing and publishing under a spreading synonym a short story with “English profanities”—and here came the judge and fined me with the then extraordinary amount of $250.
OH Having first published in Cuba, at a time when José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier were about, did you know them well? Did you like their work? Were they kindly toward you?
GI Lezama was a literary lion but Carpentier was a cowardly lion. Lezama’s prose (I am not qualified to judge his poetry because I don’t read poetry) was like an Orphic testament while Alejo Carpentier became, in Cuba under Castro, too much of a commissar to judge him kindly. (But I can say now that The Lost Steps is a masterpiece—though a Venezuelan one. At the time Carpentier was a Venezuelan according to his passport and himself.) If Carpentier looked like an alien and talked like an alien it was because he was an alien. He was born, in fact, in Geneva, Switzerland, to a French father and Russian mother. Lezama, on the contrary, was the opposite of a commissar but he ruled over Cuban poetry (my dyslexic eye almost wrote “pottery” instead) from his siege in Trocadero Street as if sitting in his sedan chair between two poles, poetry and prose. Furthermore, he was a good man, Carpentier was not.
OH Though Cuban writers like Reinaldo Arenas, Calvert Casey, and Severo Sarduy have passed on, are there any writers from Castro’s Cuba who you are friendly with, despite the “adjustments of politics?”
GI There are some interesting new writers, all born under the bad sign of Fidel Castro. Among them Zoé Valdés, a little lady with a big hand, and Senel Paz and Abilio Estévez, being homosexuals together—and for that you need a lot of courage, as proven by Senel’s short story whose outlook on life dominates all of Strawberry and Chocolate. Antón Arrufat and Estévez are now openly writing in Cuba and abroad valedictions of Virgilio Piñera, who was crushed by State Security only because he was homosexual and proud of it. Piñera died in obscurity but now his Cuentos completos are published in Spain with a brave introduction by Arrufat and a braver remembrance of his last years in Darkest Cuba by Estévez.
OH That you left Cuba in the 1960s (I believe) speaks for itself, but did you have any conversations with El Líder, and at what time of day did you decide that enough was enough?
GI I knew Castro when he was not yet Fidel in Havana in 1948. He was then a member of a gangsteroid group called the UIR, without an H. The group was leadered by a brave madman called Emilio Tró, who used to avenge past grievances by shooting his enemies—and then placing a sign over their dead bodies which said, “La justicia tarda pero llega,” meaning that his own brand of justice could be slow in coming but it always arrived. Castro was about that time a tall young thug who always dressed in double-breasted suits to better conceal the gun underneath. He was accused of killing his namesake Manolo Castro, no kin, but the black humor of a Castro killing a Castro did not escape many. Later, when he was El Maximo Líder, I collaborated with him in Revolución (I was the editor of the literary supplement) when he said in a televised speech, “This Revolution won’t be like Saturn,” meaning Kronos, “and it won’t devour its children.” I said loudly, “But it will devour its grandchildren instead.” It was pathetic but it was also prophetic. Saying things like that contributed to the banning of the magazine some time later in 1961. Enough was enough when he closed the magazine and announced his Stalinist credo: “With the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing.” And it was only for him to decide when and who were against or in favor of his Revolution. It took me years to extricate myself because you don’t leave your country as if leaving the party—which was over anyway.