Before Night Falls By Reinaldo Arenas

Before Night Falls is Reinaldo Arena’s swansong. Wrecked by AIDs in the deadly early wave, his committed suicide in 1990, three years prior to its publication. His truth doesn’t whisper so much as lash out, unapologetically loud in his views on fucking, politics and the politics of fucking.

Arena’s condemnation of Castro is total. From early expectations for improvement over Baptista, the prospects of a communist utopia retreat unrealized. He argues it is the nature of fascism to suppresses sex, humor and beauty, because dictatorships are “prudish, pompous and utterly dreary.” For his attempts to dodge these mores through life and literature, Arena is sentenced to prison until such time as he renounces his most essential impulses.

The author celebrated the fluidity of sex roles in Cuba prior to his departure. At the time, Arena explains, men routinely had sex with other men without censure for homosexuality unless they were the “passive” participant. He recounts, “I preferred to have relations with a man who had sex with women; I wanted to be his friend but not the woman who cooked for him or took care of his daily needs.” Further, the “active” participant in a so-called gay act was not considered enough of a queer by officials to be subject to deportation under Castro’s morality purges. Alternatively, Arena sleeps with his cuckold buddy’s wife, on occasion, out of “friendly loyalty”.

Arena’s metaphor for freedom is the beach. A levelling agent between old and young, rich and poor, the sea offered everyone an escape from the daily hustle. Later, after Castro chokes off access to the ocean to all but a select few party loyalists, Arena’s must be content to view the sea from afar. He notes the uniquely unnerving fate of being landlocked on a small island.

Arena tells his story shamelessly. To judge his choices is to miss the point. The pursuit of one’s gratification, pitfalls be damned, makes sense for a passionate young man confined to either tedious, unproductive poverty or insincere communist conformity.  

In America, Arena grapples with the past, almost tortured by idyllic memories of prolonged afternoon orgies in the tall grass off the beaches in Havanna. Some of this heartache comes from leaving Cuba, no doubt. But, perhaps, the greatest loss he suffers is more common. Exile or not, middle age, on its own accord, brings the pitiful understanding that innocence is precious and the body of our youth a dwindling resource. The absence of a terminal disease does not change that fact entirely.

Arena’s community was artists, writers, and revolutionaries, all who struggle under Castro. For a romantic, there is no greater hell than constraint of desire coupled with the absence of hope. The suicide of his friend, dissident librarian Olga Andreu, is treated with reverence. Prefiguring his own final act, one must presume, Arena sympathizes, “there are times when living means to degrade yourself, to make compromises, to be bored to death”. Such a dismal fate he also refused.