SOURCE: “Fictional Vignettes of Cuba's History,” in Book World—The Washington Post, January 28, 1979, p. L4.

In the following assessment of View of Dawn in the Tropics, Martin considers the vignettes “austere and bitter,” adding, “unlike the images of a good film whose overall impact is cohesive and cumulative, the impression left by these sketches is random and sporadic.”

According to Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, he grew up in an atmosphere of “misery, promiscuity and neglect,” one of a family of five living in one room and often subsisting on a diet of coffee and milk. How is it, one wonders, that this grandson of a destitute cane-cutter, son of a militant communist worker and product of impeccable proletarian origin, has evolved into one of the most outspoken foes of the Cuban Revolution?

After the fall of Batista in 1959, Cabrera became the editor of Lunes, the literary supplement...