By the time he was dicating his memoirs in New York during 1990, as he was dying of AIDS, Reinaldo Arenas had long before exhausted any sympathy for the macho dictatorship that drove him and his friends to early graves.Arenas’s rage against the regime that made their lives horrendous is palpable, without ever becoming hysterical. He matter-of-factly documents his suffering and the despair of his friends including major Cuban writers Virgilio Pinera and José Lezama Lima. Arenas’s account of his imprisonment is one of the most compelling records ever written of prison dehumanization (including the continuous rape of young men).

Besides recording persecution of Arenas and of his friends, and the difficulties of everyday life in Cuba, the book recurrently celebrates the friends who hid Arenas and got his manuscripts out of the country, castigates intellectual apologists for Castro (especially Alejandro Carpentier at home and Gabriel García Marquez abroad).

It also celebrates and records a lot of sex with “real men.” If it were not for his total abstinence from sex while in prison, Before Night Falls might have been used to show the Cuban men really are sexually compulsive! From his adolescence until his 1980 escape, Arenas encountered a number of masculine-appearing and masculine-identified men who wanted him to sexually penetrate them. He nonetheless zealously affirmed the gender-stratified conception of masculinist superiority and the conceptual and social organization of homosexuality in which only the pasivo is considered and considers himself to be "a homosexual." This is one view that he and Castro’s regime shared!

While acknowledging the dangers of being beaten, robbed, and blackmailed, he recalled a paradise of macho sexual availability (everywhere, at any time) in Cuba. In comparison, the gay-gay relations the exiled writer saw in US gay ghettoes he considered “sinister and desolate” (p. 108). Even in Cuba, those whom he labeled “common gays generally have relations with other gays and never get to know a real man.”

Before Night Falls is an important and very vivid document of life, letters, and repression in Cuba, and of the homosexual aspects of each. Along with Arenas’s novella “Arturo” (published in English with “Old Rosa”) it is necessary reading for anyone interested in what it was like to try to live as a “known homosexual” under the domination of the “revolutionary” regime in Cuba of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. It is one of the greatest prison memoirs and one of the great memoirs of living in a totalitarian society (a more spacious prison).


(This is adapted from "Heteronormative Cuban Policies and Resistance to Them" which was published in GLQ.
On Julian Schnabel's film of Arenas's memoir, see
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-2F38-316A3E8F-3A57AA80-prod2



Recommended: Yes