Why Don Quijote’s Battle Continues in Contemporary Cuban Literature: Tres tristes tigres and El mundo alucinante

The 1960s was a particularly productive decade for Latin American literature. In those years, Latin American writers produced an astounding number of excellent novels that are marked by their incredible diversity in style and/or content. Despite their variety, however, there are some common characteristics such as the recurrent theme of metafictional concerns, the presence of intertextuality, the rediscovery of parody and the importance of humour. As these elements are also present in Cervantes's Don Quijote, it is hardly surprising that his work remains of great interest in contemporary Latin American fiction. Cervantes's presence is particularly noteworthy in the early novels of two established Cuban writers, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Reinaldo Arenas. Both use intertextual and/or parodic references to Cervantes to comment not only on their own texts but also on general issues of metafictional interest. The latter's El mundo alucinante (1969) is based on the memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier who Arenas recreates as an inherently quixotic character. Arenas's rewriting of the Mexican monk's life is the hilarious narration of a truly adventurous and fantastical journey through which the author reflects on several metafictional issues. The one of interest in terms of a literary bond with Cervantes is Arenas's reflection upon the relationship between one of his three narrators (anonymous yo) and his fictional Servando, protagonist as well as first person narrator. As we shall demonstrate, in El mundo alucinante Arenas uses parody to echo humorously the relationship between Don Quijote's narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli, and Cervantes's knightly protagonist. Whereas Arenas establishes a parodic link between El mundo alucinante and Don Quijote, the references to Cervantes in Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres (1967) are of an intertextual and more indirect nature than found in Arenas. On the whole, Tres tristes tigres is 1