Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante (born April 22, 1929 in Gibara , Cuba , † February 21, 2005 in London ) was an important Spanish-speaking writer and film critic . He was considered a symbolic figure in the resistance against the regime of the Cuban ruler Fidel Castro .

Life

After spending the first few years of his life in the small town of Gibara in eastern Cuba, Cabrera Infante had lived in the capital Havana since his family moved in the early 1940s. After dropping out of medical studies, he worked as a writer from 1947 and attended the Cuban journalism school from 1950. In 1951 he founded the film club Cinemateca de Cuba as an avid cineast, together with Néstor Almendros and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea , which he directed until 1956. After stories published by him in 1952 were found suggestive, he was briefly arrested and fined. From 1954 he wrote film reviews for the weekly culture magazine Carteles under the pseudonym “G. Caín ". In 1957 he took over the editorial management of the magazine.

Cabrera Infante was initially a supporter of Fidel Castro's revolutionary idea. In 1957 he was involved in founding the underground newspaper Revolución . Even his parents were politically left-wing: they had co-founded a local association of the Communist Party of Cuba in Gibara in the 1930s and were temporarily imprisoned as communist activists.

After Castro's victory in 1959, Cabrera was again active as a journalist for the now officially published daily Revolución , the press organ of the July 26th Movement headed by Carlos Franqui . He was responsible for the weekly cultural supplement Lunes de Revolución , which was introduced in March 1959 . However, Cabrera soon turned against the increasing restrictions on artistic freedom and against literary bans introduced by the revolutionary government. The official ban on the artistic documentary film PM , made by Cabrera's brother Sabá , triggered criticism of censorship in 1961, to which Castro responded with his "Words to the Intellectuals" in which he obliged the artists to unconditionally support his politics. Lunes was then closed and Castro appointed Cabrera Infante to the post of cultural attaché at the embassy in Brussels in 1962 , which the writer himself later interpreted as “deportation”. On the occasion of the death of his mother, Cabrera returned to Cuba for the first time in June 1965, where he spent four months. He processed the impressions he gained during this stay of the strongly changed country in the posthumously published autobiographical novel Mapa dibujado por un espía .

In 1965 the tension increased and Cabrera Infante went to Madrid for a short time , then into exile in London in 1967 , where he spent the rest of his life. In his later works he repeatedly dealt with alienation from his homeland, but also with the regime in Cuba. He later described Cuba as a “huge dungeon”.

His first and probably most important novel Tres tristes tigres (Three sad tigers, 1967) was awarded the “ Biblioteca Breve ” literary prize in Spain in 1964 . Cabrera Infante describes the nightlife in Havana shortly before the revolution (1959) and integrates numerous style parodies.

In the following years he was involved, partly under his pseudonym Guillermo Caín, as a screenwriter for the American films Vanishing Point (FRG: Vanishing Point San Francisco, GDR: Grenzpunkt Null) and Wonderwall (World Full of Wonders).

He finally took British citizenship in 1979.

His major settlement with the regime in Cuba took place in 1992 at the Mea Cuba plant .

In 1993 Florida International University in Miami awarded him an honorary doctorate .

In 1997 he received the most important Cervantes Prize in Spanish-language literature ( Premio Cervantes ).

In protest against the participation of a 124-strong delegation from Cuba at a scientific conference co-organized by Florida International University, Cabrera Infante returned his award to the university in 2000. He had previously ended his long-term association with the Miami Film Festival in protest against the showing of the documentary Buena Vista Social Club during the 1999 edition.

In August 2004, Cabrera Infante had to undergo bypass surgery. A week before his death, he injured his hip in a fall. He also suffered from diabetes and pneumonia . He died of blood poisoning in 2005.

Cabrera Infante left two children.

Works

literature

  • Así en la paz como en la guerra , short stories, 1960,
  • As in war, also in peace , from the Cuban Spanish by Wilfried Böhringer, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-518-39174-7
  • Tres tristes tigres , Seix Barral, Barcelona 1967
  • Three sad tigers , from the Cuban Spanish by Wilfried Böhringer, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-39970-5
  • Vista del amanecer en el trópico , short stories, Seix Barral, Barcelona 1974
  • View of the tropics at dawn , from the Cuban Spanish by Wilfried Böhringer, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-38949-1
  • O, essays and film reviews, Seix Barral, Barcelona 1975
  • Exorcismos de esti (l) o , 1976
  • La Habana para un infante difunto, Seix Barral, Barcelona 1979
  • Holy Smoke , 1985
  • Smoke signals , from the English by Joachim Kalka, Insel, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 2009, ISBN 3-518-38250-0
  • Mea Cuba , Barcelona: Plaza & Janes: Cambio 16, 1993, Political Articles, ISBN 8-478-63035-X
  • Delito por bailar el chachachá , 1995
  • Schandtat Chachachá , from the Cuban Spanish by Claudia Hammerschmidt, 2010 Septime Verlag, ISBN 978-3-902711-02-1
  • Ella cantaba boleros, Alfaguara, Madrid 1996
  • Vidas para leerlas, Alfaguara, Madrid 1998
  • El libro de las ciudades, Alfaguara, Madrid 1999
  • Todo está hecho con espejos, short stories, Alfaguara, Madrid 1999
  • La ninfa inconstante , 2008
  • Cuerpos divinos , autobiographical memories of the revolution, Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona 2010
  • Mapa dibujado por un espía, autobiographical novel, Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona 2013

Works for the cinema

  • Un oficio del siglo XX, cinema reviews , published in Carteles between 1954 and 1960, Seix Barral, Barcelona 1973
  • Arcadia todas las noches , 1978
  • Cine o sardina, Alfaguara, Madrid 1997
  • Nothing but cinema , translated by Claudia Hammerschmidt and Gerhard Poppenberg, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-41271-X

Scripts

literature

  • Daniela Bommer: Havana in the Cuban Literature of the 20th Century. Depicted in the novels "La ciudad de las columnas" by Alejo Carpentier, "Tres tristes tigres by Guillermo Cabrera Infante", "Gallego" by Miguel Barnet, "Las iniciales de la tierra" by Jesús Díaz . Master's thesis, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 1994.
  • Kenneth E. Hall: Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the cinema . Juan de la Cuesta, Newark 1989. ISBN 0-936388-42-0 .
  • July de Wilde: Literatura, ironía y traducción. An análisis de “La tía Julia y el escribidor” de Mario Vargas Llosa, “La invención” de Morel de Adolfo Bioy Casares y “Tres tristes tigres” de Guillermo Cabrera Infante . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2014. ISBN 978-3-0352-6463-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Biografía, on the Instituto Cervantes website , accessed on September 27, 2014 (Spanish)
  2. ↑ Enrique Fernandez: Writer's Wrong, Silent Treatment Won't Oust Castro , in: Sun Sentinel of March 20, 2000, accessed on December 11, 2012 (English)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cabrera Infante, Guillermo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish-speaking writer and film critic
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Gibara , Cuba
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 2005
Place of death London