Map Drawn By A Spy - Softcover

"A geography of disillusionment. . . Cabrera Infante's tone is quiet and melancholic. . . An exile's plainspoken testimonial, bookending Orwell's Homage to Catalonia in the literature of political disappointment." -- Kirkus Reviews

"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

"Map Drawn by a Spy contains a resonant lesson about doing everything in our power to avert governments and regimes that insist on the control of goods and services to the detriment of its people." --The Scofield

"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 Pais

"The book reads with the same vertigo as that in which it was written... Map Drawn by a Spy is the intimate cartography of a farewell." -- Juan Bonilla, El Mundo

Found in an envelope in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's house after his death in 2005, 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 begins 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: imprisonment of homosexuals, 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.