SOURCE: A review of Writes of Passage, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4725, October 22, 1993, p. 22.

In the following review, Eaves critiques Writes of Passage, a translation of a story collection first published in Cuba in 1960, as "repackaging."

"Language is my business", writes G. Cabrera Infante in an explanatory epilogue to this, his first book of short stories, published in Havana in 1960 but hitherto unavailable in Britain. The Chandleresque pose may be safely assumed to be ironic: language, as far as Batista's secret police were concerned in 1952, when the literary journal Bohemia carried a short story called "A Ballad of Bullets and Bull's Eyes", is also trouble; and the author's description of his detention inside El Principé Castle prison, for publishing a fiction peppered with "English profanities", is chilling. Banged up with a group of veteran rebel detainees, Infante finds his story—about a botched assassination attempt—has been taken...