"I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself"
About this Quote
A novelist confessing unease with journalism isn’t a humblebrag; it’s a boundary dispute. Cabrera Infante is tracing the fault line between writing as inquiry and writing as assignment, between language as an end in itself and language as a delivery system for “the story.” He did the work: weekly deadlines, editorial authority, the institutional rhythm of magazines. The discomfort isn’t incompetence; it’s allergy.
Part of what makes the line land is its careful calibration. He doesn’t attack journalism as vulgar or stupid. He says he “did not really feel comfortable,” a soft phrase that carries hard implications: journalism is a profession with norms he can’t inhabit without becoming someone else. It hints at the journalist’s bargain - proximity to power, obedience to format, the necessity of shortening experience into digestible copy. For a writer famous for verbal virtuosity and a sensibility shaped by Havana’s cultural ferment and the Cuban Revolution’s tightening grip, “comfort” also smuggles in politics. In revolutionary Cuba, journalism didn’t merely report reality; it was tasked with manufacturing it. Feeling comfortable could mean being complicit.
There’s a second subtext, more literary than ideological: journalism promises immediacy, but the novelist wants aftermath. The weekly magazine trains you to chase the present; fiction lets you interrogate it, remix it, make it stranger and truer. Cabrera Infante’s line reads like a passport stamp: he passed through journalism’s border control, learned its discipline, then chose exile into art - where deadlines don’t dictate meaning, and where the sentence can refuse to behave.
Part of what makes the line land is its careful calibration. He doesn’t attack journalism as vulgar or stupid. He says he “did not really feel comfortable,” a soft phrase that carries hard implications: journalism is a profession with norms he can’t inhabit without becoming someone else. It hints at the journalist’s bargain - proximity to power, obedience to format, the necessity of shortening experience into digestible copy. For a writer famous for verbal virtuosity and a sensibility shaped by Havana’s cultural ferment and the Cuban Revolution’s tightening grip, “comfort” also smuggles in politics. In revolutionary Cuba, journalism didn’t merely report reality; it was tasked with manufacturing it. Feeling comfortable could mean being complicit.
There’s a second subtext, more literary than ideological: journalism promises immediacy, but the novelist wants aftermath. The weekly magazine trains you to chase the present; fiction lets you interrogate it, remix it, make it stranger and truer. Cabrera Infante’s line reads like a passport stamp: he passed through journalism’s border control, learned its discipline, then chose exile into art - where deadlines don’t dictate meaning, and where the sentence can refuse to behave.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
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