SOURCE: “A scrapbook of oppression,” in Times Literary Supplement, January 20, 1989, p. 58.

Below, Rankin maintains that Cabrera Infante's View of Dawn in the Tropics fuses myth and history and is informed by “an exile's perspective.”

View of Dawn in the Tropics is a brief and poignant history of Cuba, related in 117 sections. These vignettes, fables and snapshot descriptions vary in length from a paragraph to four pages, and their first lines are logged in the index as if they were prose poems. This post-modern technique of making a history from a mosaic of fragments has been employed by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano in his epic trilogy Memory of Fire, but in G. Cabrera Infante's hands the method is also reminiscent of the Extraordinary Tales collated by the Argentines, Borges and Bioy Casares. Here factual history is worn down into fictive myth: the clutter of names and dates and elaborate...