Reviews

This informative, entertaining collection of Infante's essays, speeches and book reviews features the viewpoint of an anti-Castroite expelled from Cuba's Union of Writers and Artists as ``a traitor to the revolutionary cause.'' Infante (Infante's Inferno), born in 1929, has been in exile since 1965, living mostly in Madrid and London. Antic and cheerfully defiant, he here expresses scathing disgust over Castro's policy toward Cuba's gay writers and discusses several of them. Infante's favorite is clearly Virgilio Piñera, whose work he predicts ``will live, twist and giggle forever.'' He also introduces us to Lydia Cabrera, whom he calls Cuba's greatest woman writer. The collection includes a masterful piece on the reactions of eminent foreign writers who have visited his homeland, such as Federico García Lorca, Graham Greene and Edna O'Brien. Quirky, unpredictable, often hilarious, Infante's book tells us much about the effect of the Cuban revolution on Cuban literature. (Nov.)

This collection of essays, commentaries, and satires describes the miserable and impoverished plight of the Cuban nation and especially of Fidel Castro, its leader for the last 35 years. Cabrera Infante is a distinguished literary figure who fled Cuba in 1965 to pursue a career as an author in exile, free from governmental oppression and intimidation in a nation where thought-control and censorship are daily fare and where freedom of expression is allowed only to the extent that it dovetails with the dictator's decrees. These writings reveal not only the worsening conditions in Cuba but also the difficulties faced by a writer working in exile when the political leaders of his native country mount a concerted campaign of condemnation and defamation on global scale. Useful for students of 20th-century Latin American politics and literature.-Philip Y. Blue, Dowling Coll. Lib., Oakdale, N.Y.