Volume 49, Number 5 · March 28, 2002
The Great Exile
By Derek Walcott
Guilty of Dancing the Chachachá
by Guillermo Cabrera Infante,translated from the Spanish by the author
Welcome Rain, 109 pp., $22.95
We know Havana mainly through photographs. Its great exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante, in his memories of the city in Guilty of Dancing the Chachachá, uses the kind of images that photographers love: crusted, Pompeian, the city's Technicolor faded to black and white, its poetry diminished to documentary propaganda, its graffiti to Socialist slogans, while its forlorn palms have waved the same banner to Death or the Fatherland for nearly half a century. But Havana's music can still be heard through peeling columns, and its folk dancers still wear the frilled costumes from old movies when its style was designed by Hollywood. The city's features are raddled with nostalgia like Gloria Swanson's in Sunset Boulevard, its black and white urchins run in a blur like the begging children in Odd Man Out, its shadows parallel those of East Berlin, its sadness scored not by a zither as in The Third Man but by the plangent lament of a guitar.
Review, 5239 words
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