[7] After Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who had supported the Cuban Revolution, became a cultural leader.

[8] Tres tristes tigres was written before 1968, the year Cabrera Infante publicly disassociated himself from the Cuban regime with an interview by Tomás Eloy Martínez for the Argentine weekly Primera Plana.

[8][12] After winning the Premio Biblioteca Breve, the novel underwent the process of censorship by the government of Francisco Franco.

The novel was originally intended for publication in 1965 but, for this reason, the printing of Vista de amanecer en el trópico was delayed for a few years and ultimately retitled Tres tristes tigres.

[11] In early 1967, the novel was finally published in Barcelona by Editorial Seix Barral with some resistance from Cabrera Infante due to the twenty-two instances of censorship carried out by Francoist censors.

Cabrera Infante intended to do for Cuban Spanish what Mark Twain had done for American English, recording the great variety of its colloquial variations.

[10] In his review for The New York Times, David Gallagher praised the English translation and its humor, calling it "one of the most inventive novels" to come out of Latin America.

[19] The English translation was written by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine in collaboration with Cabrera Infante and published in 1971 as Three Trapped Tigers.