• Map Drawn by a Spy
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Archipelago Books

Map Drawn by a Spy

Map Drawn by a Spy

by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried

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Found in an envelope in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s house after his death, 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 enters 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: the imprisonment of homosexuals, the 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.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780914671787
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

Completed in the 1960s, soon after Cabrera Infante’s last Cuban interlude, this memoir is an engaging sketch of a midcentury man of letters...It’s also the piercing lament of an exile, who sees his world disappearing even before he departs it.
—Publishers Weekly

This book has greatly moved me, not only due to the fondness I have always felt for Cabrera Infante, but also because of what it reveals about his character, the city of Havana, and the era of the Cuban Revolution ... It is a bare and atrocious testimony of what it means when, gone the euphoria and joy of victory, a revolution transforms into supreme power, that Saturn who sooner or later devours his own children, beginning with those he finds closest, who most often are the greatest.
—Mario Vargas Llosa, El País

To say that I have read Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Map Drawn by a Spy in one sitting, and with great enthusiasm, is to cut myself short.
—Juan Goytisolo, El País

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