Before Night Falls

The Cuban economy suffers under Batista, prompting Arenas’s grandparents to sell their farm and move to the nearest town, Holguín, where they open a produce stand. The entire family, including the now-teenaged Arenas and his mother, move with them. The move marks an end to their former way of life: “This was perhaps the end of our period of absolute poverty and isolation, but also the end of a kind of enchantment, exultation, mystery, and freedom that we would never find again, least of all in a town like Holguín” (85).

Arenas finds Holguín stifling and cemeterial, and resolves to leave as soon as possible. He works at a guava paste factory earning one peso for 12 hours of daily work. He uses the money to go to the cinema. Influenced by American and Mexican movies and by the soap operas his aunts listen to on the radio, Arenas saves for a typewriter and begins writing novels. He often writes through the night, causing his work at the factory to suffer.

A culture of machismo dominates Holguín. To fit in, Arenas fights other boys for girlfriends, although it is the boys, not the girls, he is interested in. Arenas deepens his voice and convinces himself he likes girls. At the same time, he develops a crush on a boy named Carlos. Carlos takes Arenas to Eufrasia’s Rub Pub, a strip club and brothel in a seedy part of town. Encouraged by Carlos and some other friends, Arenas has sex with one of the prostitutes. During the encounter he thinks about Carlos.

Though Arenas and Carlos go to the movies together every night, the most contact they dare to make is touching their knees in the theater. Arenas’s crush ends when his cousin Dulce María visits for a month. She and Carlos begin dating, and as a chaperone, Arenas watches as they kiss in the cinema. After Dulce María returns to Miami with her mother, Arenas refuses to go to the movies with Carlos again.

Arenas’s macho persona does not fool everyone. In class, one of his classmates whispers to him, “‘Look, Reinaldo, you are a faggot. Do you know what a faggot is? It’s a man who likes other men. A faggot, that’s what you are’” (92).

Throughout Arenas’s childhood, Christmas was a joyous occasion. Christmas 1957—called “Bloody Christmas” by Bohemia—is not. Arenas’s family hears shootings everyday as Batista’s army executes civilians to intimidate those who oppose them in their war against Fidel Castro’s guerrillas. These murders turn public opinion in Cuba against Batista, who flees Cuba in 1959 with his expropriated fortune.

By 1958, when Arenas is 14, there is little food and no electricity in Holguín. To escape these conditions, Arenas decides to join Castro’s guerrillas with Carlos. On the set day, Carlos backs out; alone, Arenas walks for a day to Velasco, expecting to be welcomed there by the rebels. There are neither rebels nor soldiers in the town, only starving women. However, Arenas encounters a lone rebel, Cuco Sánchez, who brings him to the rebel headquarters in the Gibara mountains. The rebel commander refuses to let Arenas join because he lacks a gun. The guerrillas give him a knife and tell him to kill one of Batista’s soldiers, take his gun, and return.

Arenas returns to Holguín to kill a soldier, where he learns that Batista’s police are searching for him: His family talked too loudly of his plans. His new status as a fugitive forces Arenas back to Gibara to prevent his entire family from being arrested; there, the rebels accept him.

During his year with Castro’s rebels, Arenas never sees battle. He claims that the press inflated the amount of fighting, of which there was in fact little. The rebels are poorly armed with antique, deteriorating guns, making fighting unwise. After seeing a peasant accused of informing for Batista summarily executed, Arenas begins doubting the revolution’s integrity.

Batista’s fall surprises most of the rebels. After their victory, Arenas and his fellow rebels descend into Holguín, where the townspeople parade them. The Cuban population and world press romanticize the handsome rebels with their beards and long hair. The 15-year-old Arenas lacks a beard and does not look like a rebel.

After Castro assumes power in 1959, his government begins executing people accused of opposing the revolution. Arenas sees a man executed for killing a rebel despite the rebel’s mother pleading for the accused murderer’s life. In the first years of Castro’s rule, these executions enjoy almost unanimous support: After years of persecution under Batista’s dictatorship, Cubans want vengeance against those who supported his regime. Castro televises the show trials of these accused “traitors,” in which one accusation is sufficient to secure a death sentence. Few realize that one dictatorship has replaced another.

At 16, Arenas receives a scholarship to study agricultural accounting at La Pantoja, a former military camp converted into a polytechnic institute in Holguín. At this time in 1960, Castro still denies that his government is communist; however, he is secretly planning to expropriate all private farmland.

There are 2,000 other young men in Arenas’s agricultural program. Secretly, Castro is also training them to be soldiers, though the students are kept ignorant of this at first. Only later does the school inform the students that their required mountain climbs in the Sierra Maestra range—where Castro hid under Batista—are in fact military training exercises. The students are forbidden to leave the school without supervision and must take a class on Marxism and Leninism.

A macho, anti-gay culture reigns at La Pantoja. However, sex between men is common. One professor regularly has a large line of students outside his door waiting to have sex with him. Arenas explains this apparent contradiction: “many of the [students] were homosexuals who played the male role. In their view, fucking other youths did not make them queer; queers were the ones who got fucked” (135). Nevertheless, Arenas hides his sexuality: Men caught together are expelled from the school under a hail of stones thrown by their classmates. There is a scandal when the school learns that dozens of students jump the fence every night to have sex with a man who comes there from town.

Castro gives a yearly speech in Revolutionary Square in Havana on July 26th, National Revolution Day. In 1960, Arenas and the other 2,000 male students at La Pantoja are sent to Havana to help fill Revolutionary Square. In Havana, Arenas discovers he loves the freedom afforded by the anonymity of a city. Despite many of the students capitalizing on this freedom to have sex with men, Arenas refrains, maintaining his straight facade. He resolves to return to Havana as soon as possible.

During the students’ visit to Havana, Castro makes a surprise speech to them at their hotel. He exalts the Revolution and incites them to fight Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. Arenas and the other students wildly applaud Castro; Arenas later learns that Castro made such appearances daily.

Before joining La Pantoja, Arenas enlists with his girlfriend in one of the Cuban missions to the Dominican Republic to kill Trujillo. He narrowly escapes death after Trujillo’s forces gun down most of the mission on the landing beach.

Upon their return to La Pantoja, Arenas and his classmates are filled with a revolutionary spirit, singing the hymns they had sung while parading in Revolutionary Square: “we had a plan, a project, a future, beautiful friendships, great promises, a huge job to be done. We were noble, pure, young, and our conscience was clear” (117). Arenas believes Castro will soon be democratically elected and is thankful for a free education.

In hindsight, Arenas reflects that the opportunity the Revolution promised poor people like him blinded him to Castro’s authoritarianism. Arenas ignores his mother’s complaint that most essential goods have disappeared from the market; the Revolution provides everything he needs at La Pantoja. Arenas also misses the significance of Castro’s decision to switch currencies. By recalling all old currency and printing new money that only worked in Cuba, Castro stripped monetary power from those who opposed him.

Following the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, Castro mobilizes Arenas and his fellow students at La Pantoja to help fight the US-backed Cuban revolutionaries. However, by the time they reach the battlefield, the battle is already won.

After the thwarted invasion, Castro declares the Revolution as openly socialist and establishes himself as the leader—“the Fire”—of the new coalition of Cuba’s socialist and communist parties called the ORI (Integrated Revolutionary Organizations). The students and teachers at La Pantoja celebrate with a parade. The vulgar communist slogans being chanted alienate Arenas. He reflects that he and his classmates were trained to proselytize communism in Cuba: “We were the ideological guides of a new kind of repression, we were the missionaries who would spread the new official ideology among all the state farms in the Island” (124).

Arenas graduates from La Pantoja as an agricultural accountant and is assigned to a farm near Manzanillo, in the southern part of his hometown province of Oriente.

Before reporting to the chicken farm near Manzanillo, Arenas visits his family in Holguín. They are starving because the government expropriated his grandparents’ produce stand—their only source of income. Arenas’s grandfather, an avowed anticommunist, no longer reads Bohemia magazine because it is now a mouthpiece for Castro.

Justice also falls to Castro’s dictatorship. Castro can overrule any court decision and hold show trials of accused “traitors.” One of the most notorious trials is of a young man named Marcos Rodríguez, who Revolutionary leaders accuse of informing for Batista to save themselves. Rodríguez is condemned and executed.

At the chicken farm, Arenas inventories the state’s newly-expropriated property. Keeping the books is impossible: Goods no longer have prices and officials constantly pilfer inventory. It depresses Arenas to see that farmers who once owned and worked the land now work there only as day laborers; because they no longer own the land, they do not care about the quality of their work. Other laborers have no experience in farm work. The government prohibits the farm from selling eggs or chickens to the starving people who come offering to pay any price.