SOURCE: “Cabrera Infante's Undertow,” in Structures of Power, edited by Terry J. Peavler and Peter Standish, State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 125-40.

In the following excerpt, Peavler compares Cabrera Infante's short fiction with his more popular works, and asserts that “in Así en la paz como en la guerra he published some of the finer short stories ever penned by a Spanish American.”

Guillermo Cabrera Infante's declarations (and declamations) on the subject of politics, particularly vis-à-vis the writer, are perhaps only slightly more extensive than his denials of its importance in his own writings. Scholars, for the most part, follow his suggestions on how to read his works, stressing their apolitical nature, while acknowledging the political content only of Así en la paz como en la guerra, a book that the author himself has faulted repeatedly for being misguided (nonetheless he recently collaborated in the...