2005 Guillermo Cabrera Infante was born in Cuba in 1929. He was the eldest son of parents who founded the Cuban Communist party. Their politics led, inevitably, to friction with the authorities (Cuba was, effectively, a US possession – following its liberation from Spain – and a Yankee playground). Guillermo’s parents were imprisoned in 1936. On their release the family went to live in Havana: the location that meant most to their son for the rest of his life.
Cabrera Infante enrolled as a medical student at the University of Havana in 1949, but promptly switched to journalism. Films were always a passion for him and he published on them enthusiastically and perceptively in the 1950s. He had proclaimed dissident views and, like his parents, spent some time in prison for pieces the authorities found offensive. Prohibited from writing under his own name, he adopted a pseudonym (‘G. Cain’ – after the Biblical outcast) and continued annoying the Batista regime.
When Fidel Castro took over the country in 1959 Cabrera Infante was, initially, a staunch supporter of the socialist revolution. The new authorities liked him as well. He was awarded a position of authority in the newly established state film institute, and an editorial position on the cultural supplement of the party’s newspaper, Revolución. He divorced his first wife and remarried during this period and in 1960 published his first volume of fiction, Así en la paz como en la guerra (As in Times of Peace, So in Times of War).
He was, however, already chafing at the party’s censorship of artistic expression. In 1962, he accepted a diplomatic position in Belgium where he could express himself unfettered. Here it was that he wrote Tres tristes tigres (1967; Three Trapped Tigers) – an exercise in Joycean verbal wit, set in Havana (his Dublin) before the revolution. It won an array of international prizes.
In 1965 Cabrera Infante finally resolved on exile from a country he loved, but could no longer – under Castro – live in (although, until his death, he would write about it obsessively, particularly Havana). After Franco’s Spain denied him residency he moved to England, becoming a citizen in 1979, the country’s first Cuban novelist.
In England he published novels and wrote screenplays and film reviews (his English was as proficient as that of any native speaker), and published a celebration of the cigar, Holy Smoke (1985). Cuba had, by now, long disowned him as a traitor to the country and his books were banned on the island. However, some Cubans saw him as the country’s greatest living novelist. His last years in England were depressed and unhappy. Castro, it seemed, would live for ever.
Cabrera died on 21 February 2005 of MRSA, while being treated in a London hospital for a fractured hip. He had requested, in the event of his death, that his ashes be kept unburied until – after Castro and his regime were gone – they could be interred in Cuba. They remain unburied.