by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Born in 1929 in Gibara, Cuba, and raised on the island, Guillermo Cabrera Infante founded the Cuban Film Archive in 1951. He worked as a fiction editor in the mid-1950s for the magazine Carteles, in which he published works of his own (stories and film criticism) that won him a following. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959 Cabrera Infante took posts in the new government. He served as Cuban cultural attaché in Belgium from 1962 to 1964, and then as chargé d’affaires until 1965. He then moved to Madrid for a short time, after which he was forced out by the government for writing critically about the dictator Francisco Franco. In 1968, having lived in London for two years, Cabrera Infante publicly denounced the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, officially becoming a dissident exile. He was declared a traitor by the Cuban government, which...