By Marcelo Ballvé

I.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante lived a paradigmatic 20th-century Cuban life. Born in 1929 in the countryside, he migrated to fast-growing Havana during World War II and was a supporter of the 1959 revolution. But he quickly became disenchanted with Fidel Castro's regime and spent four decades in exile in London. When he died there earlier this year, he did so, like many other exiles, without ever having returned to his beloved Havana.

Perhaps it was for the best. If he had returned, he would have found few traces of the cosmopolitan, neon-fringed playground portrayed in his seminal early novels, Three Trapped Tigers and Infante's Inferno. Both books, though published after the revolution, are hypnotic riffs on the pre-Castro Havana experience. Three Trapped Tigers explores 1950s Havana: the anything-goes cabarets, its daiquiri-fueled nightlife, its music scene that was arguably the liveliest in the world. Infante's Inferno, set in the 1940s and '50s, is an explicit and politically incorrect account of the author's sentimental education in Havana tenements, movie houses, and by-the-hour hotels.

It's no accident that in these novels, Cabrera Infante doesn't reach beyond 1959, when Castro's triumphant bearded troops entered Havana. The city changed after that, as did all of Cuba. By the mid-1960s, Cabrera Infante was a noisy dissident who criticized the lack of intellectual freedom on the island. Perhaps this is why his fiction lingers in the 1940s and 1950s. The Havana he knew already was a memory. With time it only receded further into the past.

II.

The translations of Infante's Inferno and Three Trapped Tigers, just republished by Dalkey Archive Press, preserve Cabrera Infante's preternatural talent for metaphors and wordplay, especially punning. Flamboyant prose tricks became Cabrera Infante's stylistic hallmark – so much so that Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes said he single-handedly created a new language: "Spunnish." In Three Trapped Tigers the puns (even when transposed into English) are often unforgettable, as when blue eyes are said to laugh "azuredly," or when a neurotic character's brain is referred to as an "addling machine." Two peroxided women crossing a street receive this catcall: "The blonde leading the blonde!"

Because of his incessant word games, critics treat Cabrera Infante as something of a circus freak. In the exhibit halls of world literature, he is included among the distinguished group of "Latin American boom" writers, who in the 1960s took world literature by storm with their novels. But if more-famous contemporaries such as Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa are placed in the boom's central pantheon, Cabrera Infante is typically relegated to a side alcove. Somewhat patronizingly, critics awarded him a niche as the linguistic stuntman of the group, a kind of pun-happy court jester. Not that Cabrera Infante cared; he wrote of his disdain for the "boom" label and said he would prefer being left out altogether.

But he was, and is, much more than just a writer with a talent for literary clowning. Today Cabrera Infante remains the preeminent chronicler of Cuba on the eve of revolution. That world is forever lost, so Infante's Inferno and Three Trapped Tigers are unique literary artifacts, surviving fragments of an extinct civilization. Anyone who wants to know what it felt like to live in Havana before Castro should forget history books and immerse him- or herself in these nearly inexhaustible novels.

On the artistic level, Cabrera Infante's achievements are equally notable. He was unrivaled at fusing the worlds of pop culture and plebeian entertainments (night clubs, brothels, dance halls) with the world of high literature. After Cabrera Infante no one could doubt that the jumble of the modern Latin American street and its nocturnal underside could be rich literary raw material. More than any of his contemporaries, Cabrera Infante was an antisnob, a connoisseur of low culture. Among other things he was an exemplary fan (and later scriptwriter) of Hollywood flicks and an undiscriminating enthusiast of popular Cuban music genres like the bolero and the mambo. Some of his best writing, in fact, is nonfiction, on subjects ranging from tobacco to pornography.

III.

Cabrera Infante's work is marked, above all, by his radical inclusiveness. Nothing lies above or below his interest. If he descends to the street, or the gutter, he does so with gusto. In Infante's Inferno he takes a break from ribald revelations to expose his artistic credo, which amounts to a kind of celebration of the vulgar.

"Nothing pleases me more," he writes, "than vulgar sentiments, than vulgar expressions." He writes that he loves movies precisely because they are "vulgar" entertainments. For the same reason, he says he loathes films that self-consciously try to "elevate" the cinema. He identifies Don Quixote's vulgarity as the characteristic that has made that novel immortal. "It's true, nothing that is vulgar can be divine," Cabrera Infante writes. "But everything vulgar is human."

Not surprisingly, vulgarians are the protagonists of Three Trapped Tigers: a member of the paparazzi, a luckless bongo player, a vain TV actor, a fly-by-night newspaper reporter, and Bustrófedon, a kind of dazed and confused oracle whose word tricks are at the center of a swirling narrative, modeled on the Satyricon.

One memorable scene that showcases the book's penchant for combining erudition and vulgar comedy begins with Codác (the paparazzo) having a dream that alludes to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. He dreams he is an old man valiantly fighting for his life with a huge, "noble fish" that he has hooked from his skiff in the Gulf Stream.

But he wakes up to find, dismayed, that the "fish" is really Estrella, a massive aspiring lounge singer who has beached herself on his bed after a raucous party and is now shamelessly groping him; she is "a villainous sperm whale," whom he fights off to avoid being "flattened, almost obliterated by that black universe ... expanding in my direction at the speed of love."

The parties and rude awakenings (and jokes) succeed one another in both novels at a breakneck rhythm. Three Trapped Tigers even comes with a convenient street map of Havana so readers can try to follow the dizzying itinerary. The map comes in handy for Infante's Inferno as well. The stories weave through this urban habitat like a conga line, pulling in and whirling off characters, spanning a seemingly endless succession of days and nights.

IV.

Yet Cabrera Infante doesn't forget that behind the festive facade, this is a spectacularly corrupt civilization, and it is on its way down. The flashes of political violence described in both books are ephemeral, background episodes, but all the more affecting for that reason. They are glimpses of the reality that lies just behind the cabaret stage, the Tropicana Nightclub version of Havana.

The turning point of Three Trapped Tigers comes, appropriately enough, over drinks. The two protagonists of a 160-page drinking spree that closes the book have washed up at a bar outside Havana. There are seven empty daiquiri glasses and a mojito on the bar in front of them as the moment arrives. The TV actor, Cué, suddenly confides to his journalist friend, Silvestre, that he is thinking of joining the revolution, which is then only a distant rumor of gunfire in Cuba's eastern sierra. "I'm going to the Sierra," he says.

Silvestre, of course, thinks he's referring to a Havana nightclub, also called the Sierra. He responds, "It's very early for the late-night and very late for the early-morning. It won't be open."

"I'm going to join Fffidel," Cué insists.

After Cué convinces Silvestre he's serious, not just drunk, they stagger outside. There is a lagoon by the bar. Beyond it they see the glow of Havana, "a radiating mirage, almost a promise against the night that was threatening to surround us."

After this the book continues for a bit longer; they drive back to Havana in Cué's convertible, and there is more carousing, more hilarious verbal jousting. But it's only their noble effort to keep the party going, if only for just a few moments longer, before the curtain really closes.

Marcelo Ballvé is on a literary fellowship in Argentina.

Three Trapped Tigers

By Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Dalkey Archive Press, 487 pages, $14.95 (paper).

Infante's Inferno

By Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Dalkey Archive Press, 410 pages, $14.95 (paper).