Map Drawn by A Spy

by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mark Fried (Translator)

Overview

Found in an envelope in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's house after his death in 2005, Map Drawn by a Spy is the world-renowned writer's autobiographical account of the last four months he spent in his country. In 1965, following his mother's death, Infante returns to Cuba from Brussels, where he is employed as a cultural attaché at the Cuban embassy. When a few days later his permission to return to Europe is revoked, Infante begins a period of suspicion, uncertainty, and disillusion. Unable to leave the country, denied access to party officials, yet still receiving checks for his work in Belgium, Infante discovers the reality of Cuba under Fidel Castro: imprisonment of homosexuals, silencing of writers, the closing of libraries and newspapers, and the consolidation of power. Both lucid and sincere, Map Drawn by a Spy is a moving portrayal of a fractured society and a writer's struggles to come to terms with his national identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780914671794
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	08/29/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Winner of the 1997 Cervantes Prize and widely considered one of the foremost Cuban writers of the 20th century, Guillermo Cabrera Infante was the author of five novels, four screenplays, and multiple collections of short stories. Born in the small town of Gibara in 1929, Infante was initially a supporter of the Cuban Revolution and served under Castro as director of the National Board of Culture. After being detained in Cuba for four months in 1968, he spent the rest of his life in exile as a dissident. His most well-known work, Tres Tristes Tigres, labeled as counterrevolutionary by the Cuban government, has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses. Map Drawn by a Spy is the third work by Infante to be published posthumously.


Mark Fried lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is the translator of Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days, Mirrors, Voices of Time, Upside Down, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Walking Words, and We Say No. He is also the translator of the historical collection Echoes of the Mexican-American War and works by Severo Sarduy, Emilia Ferreiro, José Ignacio López Vigil, Oscar Ugarteche, and Rafael Barajas Durán.

Editorial Reviews

06/26/2017
Fidel Castro’s Cuba is a barren and perilous isle in Cabrera Infante’s melancholy memoir. In 1965 Cabrera Infante was 36, living in Belgium with his wife, and serving as the Cuban embassy’s cultural attaché. Brought home by his mother’s sudden death, Cabrera finds his beloved Havana deeply altered under the new Communist government: businesses shuttered, medicine scarce, food strictly rationed, and political attitudes so arbitrarily changeable that even supporters of the revolution are jailed. As diplomatic intrigue imperils his return to Europe, Cabrera Infante visits with old friends and family. He wanders through a city in which “everyone is seemingly overwhelmed by a profound sadness,” and embarks on trysts with old girlfriends and new acquaintances. Completed in the 1960s, soon after Cabrera Infante’s last Cuban interlude, this memoir is an engaging sketch of a midcentury man of letters, with all his attendant prejudices and predilections—an admirer of Nabokov and Cortázar who drinks and womanizes with pleasure, judges harshly, and falls in love despite himself. It’s also the piercing lament of an exile, who sees his world disappearing even before he departs it: “He was in his own country, but somehow his country was not his country; an imperceptible mutation had changed people and things into their mirror image; everyone and everything was there, but they weren’t themselves.” (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-06-06
A geography of disillusionment as limned by the noted Cuban writer (Guilty of Dancing the Chachachá, 2001, etc.), once a stalwart of the Fidelista revolution.The men and women who trudged out of the mountains and into Havana 60-odd years ago were a tough, committed lot. Their civilian successors were just as tough; even when behind the compound walls, writes Cabrera Infante, Cuba's ambassador to Belgium carried a heavy pistol, while his first secretary "had already killed an exiled Cuban in Santo Domingo." Stationed in Brussels as a cultural attaché in the mid-1960s, Cabrera Infante traveled to Barcelona to collect a literary award, his movements chronicled at the order of a one-time aristocrat who, now a Fidelista, "did no work at the embassy, who never worked at all, since he had no skills or knowledge of anything." It was a silly inquiry, since, Cabrera Infante writes, the lives of every junior officer in the embassy were transparent, and all were true believers in the cause of Cuban communism. As time wore on, Cabrera Infante's commitment to that cause withered, for one thing because a certain moralizing conservatism crept in, such that homosexuals were persecuted and an editor friend of his was removed from his post for having invited Allen Ginsberg to Cuba, who then "scandalized the leaders of the Revolution by crowing in public that he wanted to go to bed with Che Guevara!" When he returned to Cuba and found that children could no longer have cake at their birthday parties and that domestic scotch tasted "like disinfectant," the bloom was most definitely off the red rose. Cabrera Infante's tone is quiet and melancholic, especially when, comparing notes with other writers such as Alejo Carpentier, he reaches a profound conclusion: "Just because the Revolution took writers in (and over) did not mean that literature wasn't a dangerous frivolity." An exile's plainspoken testimonial, bookending Orwell's Homage to Catalonia in the literature of political disappointment.

Kirkus Reviews