SOURCE: “Guillermo Cabrera Infante's ‘Vista del amanecer en el tropico’ and the Generic Ambiguity of Narrative,” in Studies in the Contemporary Spanish-American Short Story, University of Missouri Press, 1979, pp. 110-120.

In the essay below, which originally appeared in Caribe in 1977, Foster explores Cabrera Infante's narrative approach in View of Dawn in the Tropics.

El general preguntó la hora y un edecán se acercó rápido a musitar: “La que usted quiera, señor Presidente”. (p. 99)¹

I

While it may be true that Vista del amanecer en el trópico owes its title as well as many of its narrative segments to material left over from the author's Tres tristes tigres (1967), it is undeniable that the distance separating the two works is great and that Cabrera Infante's most recent work of fiction represents a marked change in his writings.² The following points constitute basic features of Vista that...