Used book – *First Light of Dawn on the Tropic*, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alexandra Carrasco

"Here is the island, rising again and again between the ocean and the gulf: here it is. (...) It will remain there. As someone said, this long, sad and unfortunate island will still be there after the last Indian and after the last Spaniard and after the last African and after the last American and after the last of the Cubans, surviving all shipwrecks and forever bathed by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, imperishable, eternal."

From the island's geological formation to the revolution, including the conquest, colonization, the war of independence, and Batista's dictatorship, images of Cuban history scroll by like a slideshow. Among simple murdered peasants or grieving women, one recognizes behind this or that comandante Che disguised as a foreign geologist, Cienfuegos with his cowboy hat, and even Fidel Castro...

Written in 1974, "Three Trapped Tigers" (Premières lueurs du jour sous les tropiques) composes a history of the island in fragments, descriptions of engravings and scenes captured on the spot: the execution of an Indian, a black slave chased by dogs, a game of chess in the midst of war, the shipwreck of a raft trying to reach Florida... so many dramatic, sometimes comical, moments that make us feel the very essence of Cuban identity.

Born in Cuba in 1929, cultural attaché for Cuba in Belgium in the 1960s, Guillermo Cabrera Infante currently lives in London. He is notably the author of "The Mirror That Speaks: Nearly Complete Stories" (Gallimard, 2003), "Guilty of Dancing the Cha-Cha-Cha" (Gallimard, 1999), and "Three Trapped Tigers" (Le Seuil, 1999).