SOURCE: A review of Mea Cuba, in New York Times Book Review, Vol. CXLIV, No. 49,893, November 27, 1994, p. 9.

In the following review, Guillermoprieto commends Cabrera Infante's profiles of several gay Cuban poets who became victims of the Castro regime, but also notes his "endless petty settling of accounts."

Those who are familiar with the Cuban novelist and essayist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (his best-known work in this country is the novel Three Trapped Tigers) will be pleased to find him in full form in this collection of essays: irritable and irreverent, generous and catty, indignant and wistful and harsh, and of course—of curse! a desperate reader might wail—endlessly punning. The titles of the sections and essays are a fair representation of what our man from Havana is up to: "Hey Cuba, Hecuba?"; "Have a Havana"; "Quiet Days in Cliché"; "Castroenteritis," and so forth.

The earliest essays gathered in...