Arts and Literature of Cuba

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was born in Gibara, a town in eastern Cuba, in 1929. When he was 12, his family moved to Havana. He briefly studied journalism at the University of Havana and embarked on a career as a writer. In 1952, during the Batista dictatorship, Cabrera Infante received a stiff fine and a jail sentence for using profanity in a short story. Thereafter, he wrote under various pseudo- nyms. As “Caín,” he was the longtime film critic for the weekly magazine Carteles . Movies were one of his abiding passions. After Fidel Castro came to

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was one of Cuba’s most influential fiction writers.

power, Cabrera Infante served as the founding editor of Lunes de Revolución , the weekly literary supplement to the official daily newspaper of the revolution. And in 1960, he published his first major collection of short stories, Así en la paz como en la guerra ( In Peace as in War ). But Cabrera Infante’s writing career would soon run up against the Castro government’s censorship. In 1960, the gov- ernment shut down Carteles . The following year, Cabrera Infante became embroiled in a controversy over the regime’s

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