Before Night Falls

Arenas seizes an opportunity to escape the chicken farm by taking a class for agricultural accountants at the University of Havana. In Havana, Arenas lodges with other students at Rancho Boyeros. There, sex between male students is common and sometimes open. Arenas befriends a gay student named Rafael Bolívar, who invites him to join his sexual adventures with other students. Arenas refuses: He still sees his attraction to men as a fault he needs to fix. However, Arenas still spends time with Bolívar and his gay friends at the National Library. Around this time, the government increases its persecution of homosexuality. Many of Bolívar’s gay friends are sent to “reeducation” and forced labor concentration camps, called Military Units for Aid to Production (UMAP).

Though he mostly remains sexually repressed, Arenas has two relationships with men he meets on the streets of Havana. One is Miguel, a prominent figure in Havana nightlife. The government sends Miguel to a UMAP camp but remains ignorant of Arenas’s sexuality, sparing him the same fate. Arenas also becomes lovers with an older painter named Luis, who teaches him about art and literature.

Arenas submits a short story to a writing contest at the National Library. The panel of judges is impressed and invites Arenas to meet them. Among them is María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, an aristocrat who, as the director of the library, employs poets in no-show jobs to protect them from political persecution and allow them to write. María Teresa finds Arenas a job at the library. Among the books and other writers, Arenas develops his literary sensibility. In 1964 he writes his first novel, Celestino antes del alba (later published in the US as Singing from the Well).

Between 1964-65, the government begins persecuting dissent more. Using the scandal of two women having sex in a library bathroom, a jealous rival of María Teresa forces her out. The new director imposes a stricter work schedule that infringes on Arenas’s writing time.

In 1965, Arenas wins an award from the Cuban Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC) for Celestino antes del alba. He becomes the lover of a member of UNEAC, Rafael Arnés, who interviews him after he receives the prize. In 1966, Arenas submits his second novel, El mundo alucinante (later published in the US as Hallucinations; Or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando), to the same UNEAC competition. Two of the judges, the writers Alejo Carpentier and José Antonio Portuondo, refuse to award Arenas’s book the prize because it indirectly opposes Castro. Another of the judges, the writer Virgilio Piñera, tells Arenas this and offers to help him edit his novel.

Arenas leverages his accolades and his lover Arnés’s influence to secure a job at the Cuban Book Institute, which an openly gay man named Armando Rodríguez runs. Rodríguez’s powerful position and friendship with Castro protects him from persecution for his sexuality.

Arenas divides gay men in Cuba into four categories. First, there is the “dog collar gay” (153), so called because his frequent arrests for having sex with men at the beaches or the baths—the main locales in Havana for seeking same-sex encounters—burden him with a metaphorical collar, by which the police can at any time drag him to a UMAP concentration camp. Second, the “common gay” (153) is primarily friends with other gay men, is interested in the arts, and avoids the beaches and the baths for fear of arrest. Third, the “closet gay” (154) lives as a straight man, often with a family, but sneaks to the baths. These men often have internalized anti-gay bias that they inflict on other gay men. Finally, the “royal gay” (154) is a man whose high position in the government allows him to be openly gay. Their high position also allows such men to travel outside the country and wear nice clothes and jewelry.

Arenas classifies Piñera as a “dog collar gay” (153). Piñera is a workaholic and a firebrand anticommunist who writes about the harsh realities of Cuba. He helps Arenas edit El mundo alucinante, in the process giving him an invaluable lesson in editing.

During Batista’s regime, Piñera lived for 12 years in Buenos Aires, eventually returning to Cuba in 1959. At the beginning of the Revolution, Piñera was imprisoned for his sexuality and anticommunism. After some influential friends secured Piñera’s release, the government surveilled him and censored his work.

The writer José Lezama Lima befriends Arenas after the publication of Singing from the Well. Like Piñera, Lima is a man of intellectual integrity who, unlike many other Cuban writers of the time, refuses to endorse books for political gain. Also like Piñera, Lima loves Cuba despite the persecution he suffers for his sexuality and anticommunism. Lima is erudite, unpretentious, and jocular. He maintains a literary salon at his home in Havana where he lives with his wife, María Luisa Bautista (who he married per his mother’s deathbed request). Lima and María Luisa have a close platonic relationship.

In the ‘60s, Lima publishes two landmark texts in Cuban literature. His 1966 novel Paradiso deals openly with gay attraction in Cuba. His 1968 play Dos viejos pánicos [Two Old Terrors] is about the terror of living under Castro. The government bans Paradiso and all of Lima’s subsequent works, which nevertheless secretly circulate in Cuba.

In 1969 at the National Library, Lima reads an essay he wrote on the importance of beauty in literature. His commitment to beauty secures Lima’s lifelong persecution because beauty threatens Castro’s regime: “Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act” (167).

Arenas imagines the political history of Cuba as the raging Río Lirio of his childhood, which swept up everything in its path. As the raging river, Castro destroys Arenas’s generation of writers either through persecution or artistic corruption. Once-great Cuban writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Cintio Vitier, and Eliseo Diego sacrifice their artistic integrity to Castro in exchange for political favor, corrupting their subsequent work. Castro persecutes those who refuse to curry favor. Some writers are executed; others, including Piñera and Lima, later die under suspicious circumstances. Some die by suicide, unable to escape persecution in another way. Art threatens Castro, whose aim is “to reduce everything to the lowest, most vulgar level” (170).

Despite the difficulty and danger of writing under Castro, Arenas and many of the other writers from his generation persevere in their dedication to their art in the ‘60s. They hold clandestine meetings to share their work and read authors banned under Castro, such as Jorge Luis Borges. The free-love counterculture develops in Cuba to some extent despite Castro’s oppression. Arenas and his writer friends rent beach houses and pursue flings with people who are also looking to temporarily escape repression.