Before Night Falls

In the ‘60s, Arenas has three main sources of joy: his typewriter, the sea, and the dissident, “free love” youth of those days. These three things intertwine in his and his friends’ lives.

Sex between men becomes an act of defiance against Castro’s repressive regime. Arenas attributes the commonality of same-sex encounters in the ‘60s to the anti-gay laws the government enacts during the decade. He believes the laws have the opposite of their intended effect, exciting rather than stifling gay attraction, especially in young people eager to defy Castro’s repressive regime.

In this rebellious climate, sex between men is not confined to an insular gay community: Arenas claims there is no such segregated community in Cuba in the ‘60s. Instead, ostensibly straight and openly gay men intermingle. Many straight men do not consider it gay to be the active partner; men are considered gay only if they are passive partners or date men. It is common for men to go to the beach with their families, sneak into a changing booth to have sex with a man, and return to their families after.

The ostensibly straight man interested in sex with men is a double-edged sword for Arenas and his openly gay friends. On the one hand, there are a lot of men to have sex with, but on the other, those men—tortured by their internalized homophobia—sometimes attack Arenas or his friends during their sexual encounters. In one of the most extreme instances, a soldier Arenas goes into the woods with to have sex tries to kill him. Arenas escapes through the trees as the man shoots at him and shouts slurs. Moreover, despite its commonality, sex between men is illegal. On Arenas and Prado’s trip across Cuba, the police catch Prado with another man. They arrest Prado, shave his head, and send him to a forced labor camp. Though they write to each other, Arenas never sees Prado again.

The conflict between gay attraction and an anti-gay culture does not always manifest violently. Some of Castro’s soldiers are torn between the dominant anti-gay culture of machismo and militarism and their own vulnerability and attraction to men:

many of the soldiers who marched, rifle in hand and with martial expressions, came to our rooms after the parades to cuddle up naked, and show their real selves, sometimes revealing a tenderness and true enjoyment such as I have not been able to find again anywhere else in the world. (192)

Arenas prefers to have sex with such men who lead straight, macho lives. Arenas establishes a dichotomy between feminine gay men in Cuba, who are to varying degrees open about their sexuality, and macho men who have girlfriends or wives and secretly have sex with feminine gay men.

For Arenas, the sea is a place of freedom and erotic adventure. Arenas finds relief from the stress of his highly-proscribed job at the UNEAC—where he is demoted to proofreader and stripped of the right to publish his work—in the ocean. His after-work swims revitalize him, cleansing him of the harsh realities of the island. For Arenas and many other young people, the sea also offers another form of escape and affirmation of life: sex. In the ‘60s, the beaches become popular locales for discreet sexual encounters between strangers. One beach, La Concha, is popular for men looking to have sex with other men. Arenas has hundreds of sexual encounters in the bushes and changing booths. In one instance, the jealous lover of a man Arenas is having sex with in a booth calls the police, who surround the booth. Arenas runs past them into the sea, where a sudden rainstorm provides him with enough cover to evade the police boats. After a couple of hours, he swims to the safety of another beach.

A rented house at Guanabo beach affords Arenas and his friends the literary and erotic freedom they want in their everyday lives. At the houses, rented by straight friends (the law prohibits gay men from renting them), Arenas and his friends write, read their work, and have sex with young men they meet on the beach. For Arenas, sensual satisfaction—both from sex and from the ocean itself—is necessary for his creativity and literary output.

In his everyday life living in the maid’s room at his aunt Agata’s house, Arenas lacks the freedom of Guanabo. Agata informs for State Security and disapproves of Arenas bringing men home. Despite the danger of doing so, Arenas secretly brings home many young men. He has a year-long affair with a medical student from Colombia, Fortunato Granada. As with many other such young South Americans who go to Cuba for school, the Cuban government takes Granada’s passport to force him to enlist as a guerrilla to fight US imperialism in his home country. After the government forces Granada to return to Colombia as a guerilla, Arenas never sees him again. To memorialize Granada, Arenas names the hero of his novel The Palace of the White Skunks Fortunato.

By the end of the ‘60s, literary and sexual freedoms largely disappear under government repression. In 1969, State Security begins harassing Arenas: he has to rewrite his novel inspired by his time near the sea—Otra vez el mar—three times because the police keep confiscating it. He tries to find a safe place to hide his manuscripts, but many of his friends have become informers for State Security. State Security gives informants certain privileges, including freedom from the fear of being interned in a concentration camp if caught having sex with a man. One of Arenas’s friends turned informant, Oscar Rodríguez, is assigned to uncover how Arenas smuggles his books out of Cuba and publishes abroad (bar one, Arenas’s books are banned in Cuba). Arenas evades Rodríguez’s questioning and hides his manuscripts, disguised in a cement bag, with a trusted friend, Dr. Aurelio Cortés.

Arenas smuggles his manuscripts out of Cuba through two friends he meets in 1967, the married couple Jorge and Margarita Camacho. Jorge is a painter who left Cuba in 1959 for Paris, where he lives with his wife. The two visit Cuba in 1967 for a large international art exhibition called the Salón de Mayo that Castro organizes to boost his still-favorable reputation in Latin America and Europe. Painters including Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso help organize the event and contribute some of their works.

Castro celebrates the foreign attendees at the Salón, including the Camachos, painting a rosy picture of artistic freedom in Cuba. However, the couple investigate the true situation of artists in Cuba. Jorge contacts Arenas after he reads his only book published in Cuba, Singing from the Well. Arenas, Piñera, and Lima tell the Camachos about the UMAP concentration camps and widespread persecution of artists and gay people.

When they return to Paris after the exhibition, Jorge and Margarita smuggle out Singing from the Well and the manuscript of Hallucinations; Or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando. They immediately find a Parisian publishing house interested in translating and publishing the books. Hallucinations, which indirectly criticizes Castro, is successful in France and shares first prize for best foreign novel published in France in 1969 with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Following the success of Hallucinations, State Security begins surveilling Arenas.

Arenas’s close friend, Dr. Cortés, is a 70-year-old virgin who lived with his mother until he was 60. Arenas teases Cortés by writing him into Otra vez el mar—the manuscript of which he entrusts to him—as a character called Santa Marica, “virgin and martyr, the patron saint of queers” (225).

State Security’s interest in Arenas’s manuscripts spooks Cortés, who unloads them onto some friends. These friends, who are religious women, read and are horrified by the manuscript of Otra vez el mar and tell Cortés of his appearance as Santa Marica. Enraged, Cortés orders the women to destroy all one thousand pages of the manuscripts. He gleefully tells Arenas what he has done.

The destruction of his manuscripts devastates Arenas. Otra vez el mar was inspired by his time spent at the sea and he intended it to be the heart of his Pentagonía, a planned series of five novels about the reality of Cuba under Castro. After mourning its loss, Arenas resolves to rewrite it.

Two years later, Arenas finishes rewriting the book. He celebrates by visiting Gibara, the place he first saw the sea, with Prado. At the docks, Arenas reads aloud to Prado the most impassioned parts of the novel. Afterwards, they meet a group of young men who they have sex with. That night, the police arrest Arenas and Prado for vagrancy; they don’t confiscate the manuscript, of which Arenas only has one copy. Upon his return to Havana, Arenas hides the manuscript and his other writings on the roof of his aunt Agata’s house. The only friends he still trusts are also under close surveillance.

While rewriting Otra vez el mar, Arenas meets three writers who provide crucial support, the brothers Juan, José, and Nicolás Abreu. Despite all facing persecution under State Security (the police regularly search Arenas’s room but do not find his hiding place on the roof), Arenas and the Abreus hold secret weekly meetings for four years to read their work. Their favorite spot is Lenin Park for its woods that conceal their meetings. The park, outside Havana, is intended for government officials with cars and the money to afford the luxury items sold by vendors there, including chocolate and cream cheese. Neither Arenas nor the Abreus have a car; instead, they have to take three buses to get there. These four years of meetings, which end in 1974, inspire a period of intense creativity for Arenas and the Abreus.