Guillermo Cabrera Infante Mea Cuba. Translated from the Spanish by Kenneth Hall with the author. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 503 pages, $23 reviewed by Mark Falcoff

Guillermo Cabrera Infante is a Cuban novelist of some distinction (Three Trapped Tigers, Holy Smoke, Infante’s Inferno) who has managed somehow to avoid the kind of celebrity perennially lavished on other Latin American writers of far lesser stature. Perhaps part of the reason lies in the fact that he lives and works in London, a city tone-deaf to Spanish language and culture. Or that he writes about a country (Cuba of the Forties and Fifties) which has ceased to exist. Or that his style is too complex and difficult for the average reader. But one cannot by any means discard the possibility that his politics have something to do with it. Having fled Castro’s revolution, he is automatically prohibited from claiming the kind of exalted victim-status which has served other Latin con men (and con women) so well in New York, San Francisco, Cambridge, Durham, and Ann Arbor.

Worse still, far from suffering in silence, Cabrera Infante has ever been an active polemicist, taking on Fidel Castro’s admirers on the soft-left in such inhospitable forums as The London Review of Books, Madrid’s Falangist Indice and its worthy Socialist successor El País