Three Trapped Tigers

by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Havana, Cuba, during the summer of 1958; published in Spanish (as Tres tristes tigres) in 1967, in English in 1971

SYNOPSIS

Multiple narrators take the reader through the cultures and subcultures of Havana in the summer of 1958.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Born in 1929 in Gibara, Cuba, and raised on the island, Guillermo Cabrera Infante founded the Cuban Film Archive in 1951. He worked as a fiction editor in the mid-1950s for the magazine Carteles, in which he published works of his own (stories and film criticism) that won him a following. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959 Cabrera Infante took posts in the new government. He served as Cuban cultural attaché in Belgium from 1962 to 1964, and then as chargé d’affaires until 1965. He then moved to Madrid for a short time, after which he was forced out by the government for writing critically about the dictator Francisco Franco. In 1968, having lived in London for two years, Cabrera Infante publicly denounced the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, officially becoming a dissident exile. He was declared a traitor by the Cuban government, which stifled public reception of his writings in Cuba. Outside Cuba many critics and writers characterized his 1967 work, Three Trapped Tigers, as one of the most radically experimental Latin American novels of all time.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Batista era

The work opens in Havana in the summer of 1958, six months before the famous New Year’s Eve flight from Cuba by Fulgencio Batista, the latest of a series of repressive and authoritarian Cuban leaders. Havana, the largest city in the Caribbean, is a port city and the center of Cuban commerce. By this time, Havana had also become the locus of world-famous tourism, gambling, and prostitution industries. Though ironic and unsentimental, Three Trapped Tigers evokes a sense of nostalgia for this dynamic era in Cuban history. The work presents swiftly moving currents of thought and emotion running within and among a wide range of characters. Through a complicated network of personal and cultural allusions, the novel links the fantasies and disenchantment of its characters to larger forces that have shaped Cuban culture.

At the time, Cuba was just a couple of generations away from having been a colony (it won independence in 1902), and only a few more from being a slave society (Cuba abolished slavery in 1886). The economy had only recently begun to shift away from its heavy dependence upon sugar production and was still largely agricultural and non-industrial. While the city afforded greater economic and social opportunities for all Cubans than before, racial hierarchies and social stratification were still firmly entrenched. In 1911 the government passed the Morua Law (prohibiting the formation of political associations based on color or race). Popular protest against the law brought a government response that resulted in the loss of over 3,000 Afro-Cuban lives in 1912, and the stifling of Afro-Cuban political

FULGENCIO BATISTA

Together with his predecessor, Gerardo Machado, Fulgencio Batista was one of the dictators of Latin America, who, like Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Rafael Leónidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, assumed and maintained power through armed force as well as the cultivation of strong ties with the United States and with local economic elites. A sergeant in the Cuban military at the time, Batista was the key organizer of an uprising in 1933 that ousted the increasingly unpopular Machado. By January 14, 1934, Batista had risen to the position of chief of the army, and had garnered enough support within Cuba and from the United States to also oust the current president—the leftist, reformminded Ramón Grau San Martín. Between 1934 and 1952 Batista and his appointees dominated the political scene, with several short-lived exceptions. He ruled directly from 1940 to 1944 and otherwise through puppet presidents.

In 1952, with the populace split between candidates from the incumbent Auténticos and the opposition Ortodoxos parties, Batista presented himself as the third candidate in a bid for his former office, but proceeded to ignore electoral protocol and to stage a coup d’état three months prior to the election. He installed himself as president. (Ironically, a then little-known political activist, Fidel Castro Ruz, had been invited to run as an Ortodoxo candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in the ill-fated 1952 election.) Batista’s regime grew increasingly repressive and corrupt, courting the financial investment of known figures in U.S. organized crime, such as Meyer Lansky, expanding the national lottery, conceding favored syndicates a portion of the take, and allowing the police to collect an unauthorized “tax” and to collude with drug traffickers and gambling institutions (Schwarz, p. 55). In exchange for such favors, the police were expected to crack down on any potential opposition to Batista. Gamblers, in other words, became part of the sanctioned structure of the Cuban economy and society.

participation until the 1958 revolution. The social fabric of Three Trapped Tigers reflects this legacy. Many moments in the novel suggest prejudices; the doorman, for example, rushes suspiciously toward the mulatto musician Eribo as he enters the apartment building of the young heiress Vivian Smith-Corona, and all of the servants who figure in the novel are black or mulatto. The privileges of being light-skinned are continually evoked by the characters, while having darker skin and hair is treated by many of the figures in the novel as socially disadvantageous and as indicative of sensuality and primitiveness. Afro-Cuban musical forms, such as rumba and son, were being celebrated in the nightclubs of Havana, and even in the United States by such shows as Í Love Lucy, yet the Afro-Cuban cultures from which this music originated were simultaneously being denigrated.

Cabrera Infante’s insistence that the novel has been written in Cuban, rather than Spanish, makes sense in view of the island’s abundance of dialects and sociolects pertinent to various cultural groups. Language is the principal indication of social status in Cuba. In Three Trapped Tigers a character’s use of language can make or break a job interview, a social encounter, or a reputation. Accents and dialects can distinguish a Havanan from a provincial, and one’s manner of speaking can reflect class and educational background. In the 1950s, as tourism and other industries expanded, many Cubans migrated from the provinces to the cities, mainly to Havana. In the novel many of the characters come from Oriente, the eastern rural province of Cuba, and their accent often reflects their origins. Cabrera Infante uses phonetic spelling and idiomatic expressions to suggest a character’s geographical birthplace and social status in Cuban society, as with Beba Longoria, the social-climbing mistress of Colonel Cipriano Suarez Damera. In a witty telephone conversation with an unnamed friend, she alludes to her lover’s good fortune, revealing their social aspirations and the corrupt complicity of the army with the Batista regime:

He couldn’t be better off. In the top aichilongs as he says. I don’t know if you heard but they given him a concession in the market La Lisa. Well, darling, not a stall, of course, but the market intotal, as he say.

(Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers, p. 34)

Similarly, much is revealed about the more educated or well-read characters, such as the actor Arsenio Cue, the would-be writer Silvestre, and the photographer Códac, through their adept wordplay. Their punning brings alive the double-entendre-filled language of choteo, described by the novel’s translator as a language that forms an integral part of Havanan conversation. A provocative form of speech, choteo uses humor and irony to play one sense of a word off another, often with sexual innuendoes.

In the novel such double entendres are perhaps most clearly found in the work of the deceased literary lion, Bustrofedón. The photographer Códac recalls Bustrofedón’s improvisation on world culture, a playful undercutting of the seriousness and reverence given to history and high culture in society.

Bustrofedón’s litany enumerates his canon of celebrated figures: “Amerigoes Prepucci and Hareun al-Hashish and Nevertitty, and Anti-greppine the mother of Nehro and … Sheets and Kelly and Fuckner and Scotch Fitzgerald and Somersault Mom and Julius Seizure and Bertold Bitch and Alexander the Hungrate and … George BricaBraque and Elder de Broiler and Gerónimo Ambusch and Versneer …” (Three Trapped Tigers, p. 223). Literary in-jokes are frequently traded between characters in these raunchy and hilarious exchanges. In scenes of ferocious one-upmanship, the characters seem to want to subvert the literary traditions that have shaped them and, at the same time, to display their own erudition.

In another scene, Arsenio’s “fiancée,” Sibila, speaks to him and to Vivian in French, the language of cultural refinement in many mid-century Latin American societies. Whereas French was the language of high culture, English was the language of commerce and popular culture, as the influx of American tourists and film in the twentieth century transformed Cuban society.

U.S. tourism in Cuba

Cuba’s climate, affordable luxury, and paradisal image has attracted tourists from the United States since the latter part of the nineteenth century. In fact, most of the tourism from then on was from the United States, where images of Cuba as a hedonist’s playground circulated widely in popular travel magazines and in film. According to the 1925 travel journal of writer Frank Carpenter, Havana “thronged with sightseers from the United States” at the time, while the “Havana Country Club offered memberships to wealthy North Americans in the 1920’s” (Schwarz, p. 3). Seductive images of “Latin” culture emerged in the United States when Cubans, Spaniards, and Argentines were portrayed by such actors as Rudolph Valentino, Theda Bara, and even Greta Garbo.

On New Year’s Eve, 1926, the Gran Casino Nacional opened in Havana, with celebrities giving toasts with champagne, then outlawed in the United States because of the Prohibition amendment. In 1939 Cuba’s largest nightclub, the Tropicana (where Three Trapped Tigers begins), opened, featuring performers like the African-American dancer Josephine Baker and the Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda. The club could seat 1,200-1,400 people and was built in the gardens of a mansion in the posh Marianao neighborhood. By the 1950s, when the novel takes place, Havana boasted several nightclubs nearly as large, a string of luxury hotels and casinos, and many restaurants and bars, as well as an internationally recognized ballet company, a symphony orchestra, and a museum of fine arts.

The rise of tourism and the investment of U.S. capital in other sectors of the Cuban economy (such as mining, public utilities, and oil) have been pinpointed as significant factors in Cuba’s shift from exclusive dependence on sugar (Pérez-Stable, p. 34). In any case, the shift had only a limited effect on the population. Much of the economic development of this period benefited the foreign investors and local elites more than the general populace. While these local elites included

WORDPLAY IN THREE TRAPPED TIGERS

A While most of the novel is rife with puns and linguistic play, nowhere is it as relentless as in the passages that involve Bustrofedon. Here are some of his renamings of famous figures from the past:

many Cubans, they also included immigrants who hailed from the United States and from Spain after the Civil War there. Beginning in the late 1940s children of these elites and of professionals in Cuba gravitated into the tourist economy, which afforded greater economic opportunities than jobs in the professions. Youth from the lower classes were also attracted to the tourist industry by relatively high wages and potential for climbing the social ladder.

By the 1950s other industries such as advertising, fashion, and entertainment were also growing, as reflected in Three Trapped Tigers by the burgeoning careers of the fashion photographer Códac, the singer Cuba Venegas, and the publisher Viriato Solaun. The rapidly developing recording careers of artists such as bandleader Beny Moré (a fixture on the Havana club scene and a peripheral character in Three Trapped Tigers) and the Trio Matamoros band, reflect the development of a symbiotic relationship between these clubs, the radio industry, and record companies in Cuba. By this time, U.S. popular culture had so pervaded Cuba that most films shown in the cinemas were American, and many American film stars were recognizable to Cubans (Chanan, p. 48).

Ironically, at the same time as the music, film, gambling, and tourist industries were booming, and prostitution was on the rise, the Batista regime maintained a tight grip on the public morals of Cuban society by censoring politically objectionable or sexually explicit publications (Cabrera Infante himself was imprisoned for writing stories that contained “English profanities”). Other tactics by which Batista’s government controlled public morality were closure of radio stations and schools. Unwilling, among other circumstances, to be hampered by censors, writers like Alejo Carpentier (see The Kingdom of This World , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times) left Cuba and had their works published elsewhere.

The United States and Cuba—proximity and profit

The Platt Amendment of 1901 established “an organic link between Cuba and the United States in which U.S. authority was grafted onto the Cuban national consciousness by appending the amendment to the Cuban Constitution and ultimately drafting the statute into the Permanent Treaty” (Pérez, p. 12). The amendment authorized U.S. intervention for the “preservation of Cuban independence, [and/or] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty” (Pérez, pp. 12-13). Cuban soldiers were increasingly trained and educated in the United States, where they were also often furnished with equipment and supplies.

By 1929 the United States was the dominant investor in nearly every industry in Cuba: sugar, tobacco, railways, utilities, mining, banking, fruit, and tourism. U.S. investors controlled 70-75 percent of all Cuban sugar production (Morley, p. 32).

After World War 11, with the advent of the Cold War (the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for world leadership), Cuba became strategically important. The island figured in U.S. plans to protect itself from any military conflicts in the Caribbean. In 1948 nations of the western hemisphere formed the Organization of American States (OAS), with the active support of the United States, whose leaders hoped the organization would give them a freer hand in Latin America than the United Nations had. It was thought that U.S. dominance of the OAS, which assumed control of economic affairs in the region, would allow U.S. investors and diplomats greater latitude, particularly in Cuba.

Throughout this period, and especially during Batista’s 1950s presidency (1952-58), U.S. support for the Cuban leader remained constant, with no change in policy or strategy until the last year of Batista’s rule. In addition to the growing investments in gambling and tourism, private U.S. investment in industry in Cuba was booming, with Texaco Oil, Goodyear, International Telephone and Telegraph, and other corporations increasing their presence on the island. U.S. business revenues by the end of 1958 were higher in Cuba than in any other Latin American nation.

Cultural fusion and social division

While African and, to a lesser degree, Asian cultures have had a profound influence on Cuban culture, from its music and literature to its food and religion, control of the Cuban economic, political, and major social institutions has largely been in the hands of Cubans of European descent and U.S. residents. In colonial Cuba Spanish-born peninsulares (a reference to the Iberian peninsula, on which Spain is located) were privileged over the locally born criollos (descendants of Spaniards), and U.S. and European residents likewise occupied privileged positions. As in many Caribbean societies, there has been an internalized racism in Cuban society; those Cubans who rise to the upper classes and attain high-level political, professional, and commercial positions are almost exclusively light-skinned. Batista’s rise to military and political power, as a mulatto from a lower-class background, stands as a rare exception to the rule. The novel Three Trapped Tigers underscores the internalization of these racist values in the entertainment and fashion industry, as well as through interactions among characters. For instance, an exchange between the mulatto musician Eribo and Vivian Smith-Corona, the wealthy blonde heiress that he is trying to seduce, illustrates a fusion of racial and class prejudices. When Eribo mixes his wit with sexual innunendo, Vivian responds coldly:

[VIVIAN:]—That’s really dirty. It’s the sort of
thing Balbina would say.

[ERIBO:]—The servant, I said.

[VIVIAN:]—What’s wrong with that? It would be
worse if I called her a maid.

[ERIBO:]—Is she a Negro?

[VIVIAN:]—What are you talking about?

[ERIBO:]—Is she black or isn’t she?

[VIVIAN:]—All right, yes.

[ERIBO:]—I didn’t say anything.

[VIVIAN:]—No, she’s not black. She’s Spanish.

[ERIBO:]—It’s always one or the other.

[VIVIAN:]—You’re neither one nor the other.

[ERIBO:]—You just don’t know how right you
are, sweetie.

(Three Trapped Tigers, p. 101)

Vivian aligns her boyfriend Eribo’s uncouth comment with Balbina; his questions draw out the presumptions behind her response. The scene suggests that social status is defined by both racial hierarchies and by determining others’ perception of one’s race.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Three Trapped Tigers defies any attempt to impose a chronology or linear structure upon it. However, three undercurrents and their antitheses seem to run through the work as a whole: illusion and disillusion, violence and repression (social and psychological), dynamic verbal exchanges and total noncommunication. While the novel’s plot is nonlinear, its movement could be summarized as follows: wandering through Havana at a near-manic pace, a photographer and his friends, mainly artists and writers, randomly connect with several models and actresses, a blues singer about to be “discovered,” and other unfixed fixtures in the city nightlife. The novel derives its energy from the verbal and physical dynamism of its characters, from their movement from squalor to luxury and back, from sheer adrenaline-filled sequences of flirtatious and decadent conversation while on the road, and from changes in location from barstool to backstage to diner booth. The central characters of the work are Silvestre, a would-be writer; Arsenio, an actor and aspiring television writer; Eribo, a drummer and advertising typesetter; Códac, a press photographer; Magalena Cruz, Beba Longoria, and Laura Diaz, models and actresses;Bustrofedón, a writer we meet only through a posthumously played recording of his work; and Mr. Campbell, an established writer from the United States.

Three Trapped Tigers pays homage to the legendary nightlife of a complex city, or a complexed city, if the sequence of psychoanalysis sessions (with an unnamed female subject) are any indication. In these psychoanalytic sessions and in the work as a whole, there is an implicit tension between the subconscious and self-conscious responses of the characters, individually and collectively, to a society on the brink of radical transformation.

The book opens in the celebrated Tropicana nightclub, with a “Prologue” in which the emcee introduces the coming spectacle. In this introduction, he addresses his audience bilingually, echoing or emphasizing his statements by switching between Spanish and English, as evident in his welcoming statement:

our ENORMOUS American audience of glamorous and distinguished tourists who are visiting the land of the gay senyoritas and brave caballerros … as we say in our romantic language, the language of colonizadors and toreros (bullfighters) and very, very, but verry (I know what I say) beautiful duennas.

(Three Trapped Tigers, p. 4)

The English language included in the introduction in the original Spanish version underscores the impact of tourism and U.S. cultural influence on Cuban society. As the novel’s translator, Suzanne Levine, writes: “English, for Latin America … represents both the detested language of an imperial presence and the desired language of economic and cultural power” (Levine, p. 91). The emcee introduces the reader to the guests at the nightclub that evening, and in so doing, he presents some of the main characters of Three Trapped Tigers. The collective and public drama of the nightclub introduction is then refracted into individual “scenes,” subconsciously or self-consciously performed by the characters.

The opening sets the reader up for the multiplicity of speakers, languages, and audiences that the work will encompass. Each subsequent section is narrated in the first person, occasionally by an unnamed narrator, as in the psychoanalytic sessions that punctuate the entire work. The collection of “voices” that are presented in the novel provides a panoramic view of Havana as a metropolitan and magnetic attraction for Cubans and for people from the United States. In addition to the range of perspectives these “voices” reflect, a similarly wide range of tones is set, both within and between the different sections of the work.

The “Beginners” section, which follows the “Prologue,” presents various characters’ reflections on their childhood or their introduction to Havana in a relatively intimate and confessional tone. Their stories contain the familiar elements of early sexual curiosity, provincial fascination with the capital city, youthful rebellion and adult disapproval, and desire for actual or vicarious escape from poverty and parochialism. Silvestre, for example, gives a seemingly nostalgic account of sneaking into Western movies at the local cinema, which takes a dramatically different turn upon his accidental witnessing of a murder outside the theater. In this case, the threads of violence and illusion converge. Violence is an integral part of other tales of initiation too; Arsenio, new to Havana and an aspiring writer and actor, is shot in the shoulder by an older actor. Laura Diaz recounts her simultaneous sexual and theatrical initiation as a young girl, when she and a friend are caught watching a couple surreptitiously having sex and then proceed to tell the story to friends and neighbors. She learns the thrill of holding an audience’s attention, but her story is charged with guilt, for having driven the couple apart by exposing their secret and for not revealing her own reason for hiding where she did, which was so that she and her friend could masturbate undisturbed.

The work’s extraordinary sensitivity to the rhythms, inflections, puns, and expressions of everyday speech and literary language brings each of these characters to life sharply. Catch the rhythm of the drummer Eribo’s homage to the bandleader Beny Moré: “Remembering Beny made me remember a common past, that is music: a danzón[musical style] titled “Isora” in which the tumbadora[drum] repeats a double beat of the double bass filling the bar and beating the most accomplished dancer, who has to put up with or dive under the swaying mean measure of the rhythm” (Three Trapped Tigers, p. 88). The pun-happy idioms of Bustrofedón, Silvestre, and the others are given twists and turns in allusive sentences charged with double and triple meanings that infuse the already-rich Cuban language with the narrators’ personal styles. For instance, Códac recalls a lunch with Bustrofedón, describing how their raucous behavior drove the waiter to refuse to serve them. The description incorporates figures from Greek mythology (Icarus, Poseidon, Nausicaa) and an allusion to a well-known newspaper (the Herald Tribune) among other puns:

… and the fellouch refuses to serve us and gets off our cloud to plunge icariously into the horizontal chasm of thiseatery and starts bellyaching in the backroom to the Poseidowner and we’re still there in the hearafter drowning of laughter on the shores of the tablecloth, almost nausicated, with this unbelievable public proclaimer Bustrophone herald tribunely crying out loud.

(Three Trapped Tigers, p. 208)

Much of the novel’s remarkable accomplishment lies in its evocation of the history, music, language, and spirit of an extraordinarily complex cultural moment, and it manages this largely through a dizzying, dynamic use of language. For instance, through phonetic spelling, it manages to present the verbal rhythms of the straightforward though parochial Delia Doce, as she would translate them to writing. Delia writes a letter to her friend Estelvina, whose daughter, Gloria Pérez, left their hometown to live in Havana. Delia recounts Gloria’s disastrous stay with her, characterizing her rise to fame as being accompanied by a moral fall, and ends with this moral observation:

As I was saving this daughter of yours turned out a right good for nothing hear in Havana which is a very dangeroused city for young peeple from the Country without any experience on life whatso ever.

(Three Trapped Tigers, p. 19)

Delia’s language and her attempt to render a formal account of events reflect her lack of education and comically reveal her naivete in the process. In the monologue by aspiring actress and model Magalena Cruz that follows Delia’s section, a very different tone is set, as the language of this passage captures the rhythms of casual phone conversation. Here again, the novel uses phonetic spelling to replicate Magalena Cruz’s colloquial speech, as well as creative punctuation to capture the idiosyncrasies of her speaking style and her personality. Her perspective is nearly directly opposed to Delia’s, as she recounts a fight with her older and morally judgmental hostess-housemother from the point-of-view of a young but streetwise model: “and so I pick up my stylish stole and my bitchy bag and I take one mean step, yeah, then two mean steps, yeah yeah (Three Trapped Tigers, p. 14). Our perspective on Magalena’s tough talk alters dramatically when it is later intimated that she had repeatedly been exposed to violence, and possibly suffered a breakdown and endured shock therapy.

Puns serve as a deferral or an evasion of pain, as much as a tactic of seduction. Many of the characters furthermore use humor to deflate myths, whether these myths are about Cuban or American history, or about origins, or about (often apocalyptic) endings. Similarly, humor and parody both pay homage to and subvert the writers that comprise the canon of Cuban literature. Examine, for instance, the life spans attributed to each writer. Alejo Carpentieri years are given as 1904-1882, 22 years lived in the wrong direction (an allusion to his novella Journey to the Source). Similarly, Virgilio Pinera is fictively killed off with the year of death given as 1966 (he was alive at the time of the book’s publication); the latter move could be a not-so-subtle dismissal of the value of Piñera’s later literary production.

While the novel as a whole takes the reader on a linguistic and narrative journey through Havana, the parodist-ventriloquist Bustrofedón leads his reader/listener on another journey in the section titled “The Death of Trotsky as Described by Various Cuban Writers, Several Years After the Event—or Before.” This section is a transcription of a recording of Bustrofedón’s literary creation, an imaginary collection of written accounts of the murder of Leon Trotsky. The collection contains descriptions by José Martí, poet and leader in the struggle for Cuba’s independence (see “Our America,” also covered in Latin American literature ana Its Times)] Virgilio Pinera, the aforementioned poet/playwright; and others, from the celebrated poet/novelist José Lezama Lima to the poet Nicolás Guillen. Two sections in particular illustrate the humor of Bustrofedón’s mimicry of the lauded writers, those “by” the ethnologist Lydia Cabrera and the novelist Alejo Carpentier. The section by Cabrera mocks the anthropologist-as-interpreter mode that she employs in her writing, with a comical “translation” of the murder of Trotsky as an Afro-Cuban ritual. In this section, Bustrofedón provides the “original” language in parentheses, the humor of which is evident when one thinks of common English words associated with the phonetic sounds of these terms: “What a difficult situation! There remained (Ollefì no other (nozingelsu) solution (Ungawa!) than to go away (fokkoffo)!” (Three Trapped Tigers, p. 250). Carpentieri literary style is lampooned with an ironic replication of his baroque language and of the self-conscious erudition of his novel The Lost Steps, here parodied as “Lot’s Steps.” In this description of Trotsky’s reflections, Carpentieri self-conscious erudition is reproduced in burlesque:

He walked down steeply sloping bifid paths bordered by volcanic rubble and gazed at the imposing châteaufort which already towered above him. He was facades that mingled a delirium of styles, where Bramante and Vitruvius disputed the primacy with Herrera and Churriguera and where traces of early Plateresque were fused with a bold display of late Baroque.

(Three Trapped Tigers, pp. 260-61)

These parodies reveal the primacy of style in these writers’ efforts to relay meaning. This section of the novel presents storytelling as a process, and exposes the subjectivity of supposedly “factual” accounts, as does the section in which Mr. Campbell tells and retells his “story of the stick,” a fictional account of the loss of a cane purchased on his visit to Cuba. His account is retold by the fictional Mrs. Campbell in a “corrected” version, which is followed by Mr. Campbell’s response to her edits. All of these scenes reveal Cuba, and particularly Havana, as a textual world. In it, places, events, people, and speech are all filtered through the visual and verbal language of film and literature. Not only do the characters often talk in Hollywood film-speak and allude to literature and popular culture, but Havana emerges in Three Trapped Tigers as a city experienced through the images of literature and film.

Havana: Cabrera Infante’s Paradiso/Inferno

The depiction in Three Trapped Tigers of the cultures and subcultures of Havana in 1958 relies heavily on the evocative use of language and of cultural references, as well as on the unique perspective of an exile. Unlike the majority of Cuban exiles, Cabrera Infante moved from being an advocate of the revolution and an insider in the cultural institutions of the early revolutionary government to being one of the earliest dissident exiles of that government. While Mario Vargas Llosa (see The Storyteller , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times) claims that Cabrera Infante’s vision of Havana “owes much more to the writer’s fantasy than to his memories,” he then says of this version of Havana:

There it is now, spirited into reality, more real than the one that served as its model—living almost exclusively by night, in those convulsive, pre-revolutionary years, shaken by tropical rhythms, smoky, sensual, virulent, journalistic, bohemian, jocose and gangsterish, in its savory eternity of words.

(Vargas Llosa, p. 56)

Such a notion of spiriting Havana into reality coincides with Cabrera Infante’s repeated assertions that his books are not really novels. As the author himself states:

I don’t take a map of the city with me because everywhere I go I have Havana on my mind….. My contention is that by remembering I can rebuild Havana, brick by word, word by word, all guided by my memory. … I use nostalgia to form and inform what I write. She is actually the whore of memory but I’ve married her the way some people marry money. Call me Mr. Memory.

(Cabrera Infante in Levine, p. 24)

While perhaps not brick by brick, Cabrera Infante reconstructs Havana street by street, as the characters’ routes through the city take the reader along actual streets such as the coastal Malecón and the grand Quinta Avenida, through the Parque Central and through the posh neighborhoods of Miramar and Marianao. Many of the landmarks of Three Trapped Tigers are familiar places to readers of the English novelist Graham Greene, whose writing invokes the Hotel Inglaterra and the Tropicana Cabaret, or to fans of U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway, who preferred El Floridita bar and the Bar Celeste. In Three Trapped Tigers Silvestre’s story of sneaking into movies with his brother mentions the Majestic and the Alcázar, two of the more than 20 movie houses in Havana alone, which showed primarily films from the United States. Constant references to street names and numbers, beaches, clubs, and bars, locate the characters in a precisely Havanan landscape. Such references even place the characters in their social milieu, such as when Códac refers to Vivian’s friends as people who frequent the clubs and casinos of high society—they are “Havana Yacht Club types, or Vedado Tennis, or Casino Español” (Three Trapped Tigers, p. 89).

Sources and literary context

Cabrera Infante has stated in a number of interviews that he drew inspiration from James Joyce’s novels, particularly Ulysses (a 24-hour odyssey through Dublin, with real and fictitious local specificity), for his depiction of the world of Three Trapped Tigers. As the Spanish-language translator of Joyce’s Dubliners, Cabrera Infante certainly has an intimate understanding of how Joyce renders the geography, rhythms of speech, history, and culture of Dublin, and the fact that Joyce wrote from self-imposed exile compounds the parallels one could draw between their works. Likewise, Cabrera Infante also acknowledges a literary debt to Roman author Petronius’s Satyricon (an account of two students journeying through Italy in the age of Nero), and to Lawrence Sterne’s Tnstram Shandy. While Three Trapped Tigers draws on too many films to identify, U.S. westerns, film noir, and gangster films of the 1940s and ‘50s (such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) figure most prominently in the dialogues of the protagonists of Cabrera Infante’s novel. Likewise, a number of Cuban personalities mentioned in the work, such as the bandleader Beny Moré and the critic Rine Leal, were celebrated figures in Havana at that time. The character La Estrella, who so captivates Códac with her voice, is said to be modeled after Frédy, a popular Havanan singer. Coupled with the censorship of Saba Cabrera’s film P.M. (see below), the news of Frédy’s death in 1961 prompted Cabrera Infante to begin writing Three Trapped Tigers (Levine, pp. 70-71).

The surreal quality of the novel is attributed to Cabrera Infante’s evocation of Lewis Carroll, as suggested in the epigraph to the novel: “And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out,” a quotation from Alice in Wonderland (Three Trapped Tigers, epigraph). The central “Mirrormaze” section in Three Trapped Tigers, which uses inversion and reflection (literally by the mirroring of a page of text onto the facing page), suggests a parallel with another Carroll work, Through the Looking Glass. Similarly, there is a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” that evokes Carroll’s “Jabberwockey” in its nonsensical language: “While I nodled, noodled, nundled, trundlingly I come unsundered,/As if someone howsomever, rapping, crapping at my do’er” (Three Trapped Tigers, p. 212).

The epilogue to the novel, a rambling monologue by an anonymous woman, is said by Cabrera Infante to have been drawn from the speeches of a homeless woman whom he had encountered often in downtown Havana. In this final moment of Three Trapped Tigers, racism, religious chauvinism, hunger, and violence are alluded to in an outpouring of apocalyptic fervor. Her speech impresses on the reader a sense of fatality and desperation in the face of the corruption and violence of Batista’s regime.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Revolutionary history

The fall of Batista in 1958 left a political vacuum in Cuba, according to several historians, with the populace deprived of any access to traditional institutions of political decision making. On July 18, 1959, after a five-month interim with an anti-communist president, Castro and his close friend and ally Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado installed themselves as prime minister and president, respectively. Their revolutionary government stepped into the vacuum, and they immediately set about creating their own revolutionary institutions, replacing, for example, the military forces with the Rebel Army. Cabrera Infante took an active part in these new institutions in their early days, serving as editor of the national daily newspaper’s cultural weekly, titled Lunes de Revolución. This journal featured pieces by well-known Cuban writers like José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, and in addition to fiction, included articles and reviews of film and art. By 1961 Castro had launched major literacy and health care campaigns (with impressive results), and early that year he publicly declared Cuba a socialist country and himself a Marxist-Leninist. Castro demanded that the United States dramatically cut back the size of its Havana embassy, and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba on January 3, 1961. By February 2 the new U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, had authorized an April 17th invasion of Cuba. This attack, known in the U.S. as the “Bay of Pigs” invasion (in Cuba it is called “Playa Girón”), went forward with disastrous results, traceable to a lack of enthusiasm for it in Cuba and to Kennedy’s own lukewarm support. The Cuban counter-revolutionaries were defeated, many U.S. soldiers were captured (though freed by Christmas of that year), and the stakes were raised in the conflict between the United States and Cuba. Cabrera Infante served as a war correspondent for Revolution during the “Bay of Pigs” invasion.

However, six weeks after the invasion, upon the censorship of a film made by his brother, Saba, Cabrera Infante’s relationship to the Castro government changed dramatically. In May 1961 the film, entitled P.M., concerning the nightlife of pre-revolutionary Havana, was televised in Cuba. When the filmmakers applied for permission to exhibit the film in theaters, they were asked to send it to the government’s film institute. Expecting no objections, they sent the film to ICAIC (the national film institute), where, over the protests of more than 200 writers and artists, Guillermo Cabrera Infante among them, it was quickly banned from any further public exhibition and confiscated. Soon after, and most likely because of the protest, the cultural weekly edited by Cabrera Infante was shut down. The reason given for banning the film was its irresponsibility to the ideals of the revolution, most likely because its treatment of pre-revolutionary nightlife in Havana diverged from the prescribed social realist style and content called for in documentaries produced in the revolutionary era (Chañan, p. 102).

Soon after, Cabrera Infante was appointed cultural attaché to Belgium, and left Cuba for Brussels, where he lived for the next four years, shifting from cultural attaché to chargé d’affaires before making a visit home for his mother’s funeral in 1965. Detained for four months in Havana, Cabrera Infante then left Cuba for good, resigning from his post and moving to Madrid in that same year. While in Europe he wrote a manuscript for Three Trapped Tigers, focusing on the period and the context treated in his brother’s film. In several interviews, Cabrera Infante cites the movie—and its censorship—as an inspiration for the novel. After his prize-winning manuscript received numerous “recommended” cuts from the censors in Spain, then under dictator Francisco Franco, Cabrera Infante began the rewriting process. The censors’ primary objections were to his references to sexuality and homosexuality and their association with military figures and institutions in the work. Cabrera Infante retained much of the sexual content of the novel, but reworked it by shifting its focus to literary parody rather than politics. He then published the novel with the Seix Barral publishing house, the company that sponsored one of the prizes (the Biblioteca Breve prize) earned by his manuscript. Eventually forced out of Madrid in 1967 for writings that were critical of Franco, Cabrera Infante moved to London. Keeping a low profile, but growing increasingly discontented with reports of escalating censorship and repression by the Cuban government, Cabrera Infante publicly denounced the Castro regime for the first time in 1968. In the meantime, Three Trapped Tigers was gaining international acclaim, though Cabrera Infante was then censored from the left as well as the right for his denunciation of Castro. His books were (and continue to be) banned in Cuba, though people there paid high prices for copies smuggled into the country.

Reviews

Though his books are banned in Cuba, several reviews of his work written by Havana-based writers have been published by the Free Press Agency of Cuba (APIC) and in several Cuban-American journals and papers. One such review, by journalist David Bacallao Velez, describes the style of Three Trapped Tigers as “concise, with tremendous aesthetic and compositional rigor” (Bacallao Velez, p. 1; trans. V. Sams). Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa states that Cabrera Infante’s prose “is one of the most personal and unusual creations in our language: an exhibitionistic, luxurious, musical and intrusive prose,” and he declares Cabrera Infante’s 1997 Cervantes Prize well deserved (Vargas Llosa, p.56). Leland Guyer rounds out the chorus of praise by calling Three Trapped Tigers “a wondrous novel” (Guyer, p. 358).

—Victoria Sams

For More Information

Bacallao Velez, David. “El Proyecto Prensa Libre.” AP1C, February 8, 1998.

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. Three Trapped Tigers Trans. Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine in collaboration with the author. New York:Marlowe and Company, 1971.

Chañan, Michael. The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Domínguez, Jorge I. Cuba: Order and Revolution Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Guyer, Leland. “Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds.” World Literature Today 71, no. 2 (spring 1997): 358.

Levine, Suzanne Jill. The Subversive Scribe:Translating Latin American Fiction. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1991.

Lumsden, Ian. Machos, Mancones, and Gays Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

Morley, Morris H. Imperiai State and Revolution: The US and Cuba, 1952-1986. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Pérez, Louis ?., Jr.Army Politics in Cuba: 1898-1958 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.

Pérez-Stable, Marifeli. The Cuban Revolution: Oñgins, Course, Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Schwarz, Rosalie. Pleasure Island: Tounsm and Temptation in Cuba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Touchstone.” The Nation 266, no. 17 (May 11, 1998): 56-62.