Guillermo Cabrera Infante, one of Cuba's most extraordinary writers, winner of the Cervantes Prize in 1997 and another example of how the Cuban Revolution became just another example of a revolution eating its young, died yesterday at the age of 75.
Cabrera was born in 1929 in Gibara, Cuba, to parents who were founding members of the Cuban communist party. After the Castro-led revolution and overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Cabrera became editor of Revolución, the literary supplement of the new regime's mouthpiece. However, he fell out of favour after opposing the government's decision to ban a documentary on Havana nightlife made by his brother. Castro publicly rebuked him in a trial and he was henceforth forbidden to publish; instead, he went on to accept the position of Cuba's cultural attaché in Brussels in 1962. After returning to Cuba for his mother's funeral in 1965, he accepted that he could no longer continue to live in his home country. After a brief period in Madrid he settled in London and took on British citizenship, saying in 1997 that "I have not been back (to Cuba) since I left in 1965, and will not until Fidel Castro leaves power".
And like Célia Cruz and countless others he went to his grave never seeing his native land again. Rest in Peace.
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