Eco-logías del exilio: Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Abstract

The books by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005), “the only English author who wrote in Cuban”, not only stand out for their great humor and continual wordplay, but also for attempting to make resurge what he had to leave behind when he went into exile: his island, Cuba, and particularly Havana. His writing thus oscillates between the arbitrariness exposed in his puns and the endeavor to represent the absent. Like that – and with what I have called “eco-logics” of Cabrera Infante’s writing –, he succeeds in joining his obsession with playing with words by decomposing them and revealing their treacherous arbitrariness, with his stubborn effort to make them translate and represent his lost Havana. In this way, Cabrera Infante’s texts become palimpsests of the necessity to re-present, archive and safeguard that which is lost, while simultaneously ridiculing that very endeavor by connecting mockery and searching, joking and desperation.