[Vista del amanecer en el trópico (View of Dawn in the Tropics)]—whether a novel or collection of stories is unclear, or perhaps unimportant, as proven by the use of both terms on the jacket and cover of this edition respectively—seems to be a revision of the fragments Cabrera Infante excised from Tres tristes tigres and which were part of an earlier and identically titled manuscript, winner of the Premio Biblioteca Breve in 1964. Censorship prevented the winning manuscript from being published in Spain in its original form. The result, then, has been publication of two books: first, the famed novel, and now this other text.

In comparison with the author's own previous descriptions of Vista, this final version is more like a complete rewriting of the socialist realist text he had originally conceived for these fragments…. It is a collection of moments in Cuban history whose...