Born in
Gibara in Cuba's former
Oriente Province (now part of
Holguín Province), in 1941 he moved with his parents, to
Havana, which would be the setting of nearly all of his writings other than his critical works. His parents were founding members of the
Cuban Communist Party. Originally he intended to become a physician, but abandoned that in favor of writing and his passion for the cinema. Starting in 1950, he studied journalism at the
University of Havana. Under the Batista regime he was arrested and fined in 1952 for publishing a short story which included several English-language profanities. His opposition to Batista later cost him a short jail term. He married for the first time in 1953. From 1954 to 1960 he wrote film reviews for the magazine
Carteles, using the
pseudonym G. Caín; he became its editor in chief, still pseudonymously, in 1957. With the triumph of the
Cuban Revolution in 1959 he was named director of the Instituto del Cine. He was also head of the literary magazine
Lunes de Revolución, a supplement to the Communist newspaper
Revolución; however, this supplement was prohibited in 1961 by
Fidel Castro. He divorced in 1961 and in the same year married his second wife, Miriam Gomez, an actress. Having fallen somewhat out of favor with the Castro regime (the government's ban on a documentary on Havana nightlife made by his brother led to his being forbidden to publish in Cuba), he served from 1962 to 1965 in
Brussels, Belgium, as a cultural attaché. During this time, his sentiments turned against the Castro regime; after returning to Cuba for his mother's funeral in 1965, he went into exile, first in
Madrid, then in London. In 1966 he published
Tres tristes tigres, a highly experimental,
Joycean novel, playful and rich in literary allusions, which intended to do for Cuban Spanish what
Mark Twain had done for
American English, recording the great variety of its colloquial variations. It won the 1964
Premio Biblioteca Breve for best unpublished novel. He co-wrote the script for
Richard C. Sarafian's 1971 cult film
Vanishing Point under the pseudonym Guillermo Caín. Although he is considered a part of the famed
Latin American Boom generation of writers that includes his contemporary
Gabriel García Márquez, he disdained the label. Ever an iconoclast, he even rejected the label "novel" to describe his most acclaimed works, such as
Tres tristes tigres and
La Habana para un infante difunto. He was influential to Puerto Rican and Cuban writers such as
Luis Rafael Sánchez (
La guaracha del Macho Camacho) and Fernando Velázquez Medina (
Última rumba en La Habana). In 1997 he received the
Premio Cervantes, presented to him by King
Juan Carlos of Spain. He died on February 21, 2005, in London, of
sepsis. He had two daughters from his first marriage. == Bibliography ==