SOURCE: Ugalde, Sharon Keefe. “Beyond Satire: Ibargüengoitia's Maten al león.” Discurso Literario 1, no. 2 (1985): 217-29.

In the following essay, Ugalde elucidates the patterns of satire found in Maten al león.

After an entertaining visit to Arepa—the imaginary Caribbean island of Jorge Ibargüengoitia's novel Maten al león (1969)—one cannot help but ask, where have all the heroes gone, and who invited such a collection of fools and knaves?¹ What we have is a satire, “the comic struggle of two societies one normal and the other absurd … reflected in its double focus of morality and fantasy.”² Although the situation portrayed in the novel is real, in the sense that it refers to actions characteristic of various early twentieth-century Latin American dictatorships, there is a deliberate avoidance of naming any specific country or historical figure. The setting resembles Cuba, but the events could be from the...