Recipient of the 1997 Cervantes Award

"[Cabrera Infante's] prose in one of the most personal and unusual creations in our language: an exhibitionistic, luxurious, musical and intrusive prose, which cannot recount anything without at the same time recounting itself as well... A brilliant disciple of the great Anglophone language juggles, such as Lewis Carroll, Laurence Stern and James Joyce, his style is nevertheless unmistakably his own... The Cervantes Prize, given him in 1997, is not only an act of justice to a great writer, it is also an offering of amends to a singular creator who, die to intolerance, fanaticism, and cowardice, has spent half of his life living as a specter and writing for nobody, in the most untrammeled solitude."
- Mario Vargas Llosa, The Nation

"It now seems utterly extraordinary that anyone can write brilliant prose in more than one language; we marvel at a Nabokov, a Beckett, a Cabrera Infante."
- Susan Sontag

"An enduringly original literary presence, unquestionably Cuba's most important living writer."
- Alistair Reed, The New York Review of Books