Before Night Falls

State Security sends Arenas to a sugar plantation run by the military in Pinar del Río both to work and to write a propaganda novel about the sugarcane harvest. Like slaves once were, Arenas and the young military recruits are forced to work from dawn until dusk under the harsh sun in the fields of sugarcane, whose leaves cause severe itching. Working day after day in these conditions, Arenas comes to understand why some slaves preferred death by suicide to the work. Some of the military recruits—most of whom are teenagers—intentionally maim themselves with their machetes to get respite. The recruits who defy the rules and visit their families on weekends are sentenced to 20 to 30 years of prison or forced labor. Arenas secretly writes a poem called “El central” about the brutal conditions on the plantation; he also keeps a diary in which he records his and the workers’ travails.

Despite the harsh conditions and overwhelming lack of free time—Arenas, like the other workers, is only allowed a few hours of free time every two weeks—Arenas finds some comforts in the plantation. The surrounding landscape is mountainous and beautiful and a sexual energy suffuses the camp. A lieutenant recruits Arenas to teach him French; during the lessons, the lieutenant places his genitals on Arenas’s desk, to his enjoyment. In another instance, Arenas and a recruit exploit a rare moment of privacy to have sex.

Castro fails in his goal of a ten-million-ton sugarcane harvest, devastating Cuba’s agricultural capacity in the process: Tens of thousands of fruit trees were destroyed to plant sugarcane and the expensive machinery at the sugar mills is damaged by overproduction. The failure makes Cuba poorer than any state in the Soviet Union.

Castro falsely accuses the US of kidnapping a group of Cuban fishermen to distract from his failure, organizing nationwide protests against the US A week later the fishermen are “returned” and Castro declares victory, throwing a month-long festival that depletes Cuba’s remaining resources. The urinals at the festival become popular places for men to have sex with each other, offering temporary escape from repression. The festival distracts the population from reality: “It was absolutely necessary to forget, by any means, that we had been the butt of a bad joke, that the efforts of all those years had been useless, that we were a completely underdeveloped country, more and more enslaved every day” (263).

The government refuses to grant intellectuals exit permits, though many apply. Stuck in Cuba, Arenas and other writers assert what few literary freedoms they have. A number of people hold secret literary gatherings at their homes. One of these people is a woman named Olga Andreu, whose home becomes a literary refuge.

It becomes clear that such meetings will not be possible for long: The government is determined to root out dissident writers whose popularity with young people represents a threat to Castro’s regime. Some writers at the meetings begin informing on them to State Security. Years later, after Andreu’s gatherings become impossible and the writers who attended them are either dead, imprisoned, or exiled, Andreu, like many others, dies by suicide to escape persecution: “Olga had wanted to enter that timeless world where State Security could no longer define her parameters, with all her sense of joy and her dignity intact” (269).

State Security makes an example of Padilla because he enjoys international acclaim and submitted a book critical of Castro to an official Cuban competition. In 1971 they imprison him for a month, during which they physically and psychologically abuse him. State Security forces Padilla to make a speech at UNEAC denouncing himself, his wife, and other writers as counterrevolutionary, and declaring himself a convert to the Revolution. Guarded by armed State Security officers, the writers Padilla names each go to the podium to make similar denunciations. The only one who dares to challenge the charade, Norberto Fuentes, is threatened and shouted down. Such public humiliation is one of Castro’s favorite methods of repression. State Security distributes the film of these writers’ self-denunciations at UNEAC internationally as proof of artistic freedom.

Around this time, Castro founds an entity called the First Congress of Education and Culture to police “ideological diversionism” (282), which includes fashion and homosexuality. The First Congress enacts a system of parametraje (parameterization) to fire gay people from their jobs on the basis of their sexuality falling outside the “political and moral parameters necessary for his job” (283). State Security officers pose as gay men to entrap real gay men, who they then “parameterize”—fire and force into manual labor.

People begin taking extreme measures to escape Cuba. One man jumps from a roof into the Argentine embassy; Cuban police ignore Argentine sovereignty and arrest him. Others make the dangerous swim to the US naval base at Guantánamo and request political asylum. Some die by suicide. Often the easiest option is to become an informant for State Security; many of Arenas’s friends take this route, including Prado.

Arenas’s friendship with Jorge and Margarita helps sustain him through this period of intense persecution. They communicate with him secretly through French tourists, with whom they send gifts of clothes and shoes (which are practically impossible to buy in Cuba). These gifts become symbols of freedom and life to Arenas.

Arenas visits his mother in Holguín. She is depressed, lonely, and worried that the police will imprison Arenas. Every time Arenas visits her in Holguín, she asks him to get married and bring her a grandson.

Back in Havana, Arenas’s aunt Agata tries everything to evict him from her house. She steals the gifts Arenas receives from Jorge and Margarita. She also steals everything from her neighbors’ abandoned houses and tricks an old woman into giving her all her furniture in exchange for an exit permit. Agata intercepts what mail State Security does not intercept to Arenas from foreign publishers. She monitors the visitors Arenas entertains and searches his room, forcing him to hide his work on the roof immediately after he finishes it. For some time, Arenas successfully fights her attempts evict him.

One of Arenas’s writer friends, Nelson Rodríguez—who was imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1964 for being gay—is desperate to escape the renewed persecutions in Cuba. Rodríguez and a teenaged poet hijack a domestic flight to try to divert it to the US. The armed guards aboard the flight foil their plans, but Rodríguez detonates a grenade, blowing a hole in the plane and forcing a landing. On the ground, he tries to escape through the hole but is seriously injured by the propeller. Arenas worries State Security will find the letter of recommendation he wrote for Rodríguez to his publisher in Paris and implicate him in the plot (of which he was unaware). The police do not find the letter. The government executes Rodríguez and the teenaged poet.

The incident makes it imperative for Arenas to find somewhere else to live because Agata now believes he is a terrorist. Many mansions in Miramar—the historic neighborhood in which Agata lives—are empty, as their owners fled after the Revolution. However, finding somewhere to live is difficult for Arenas because the State owns all housing and only gives it to people with political credit.

To improve his chances of finding housing, Arenas marries a woman, the actress Ingrávida Félix. The marriage also benefits Félix, who although straight is parameterized for her free sex life—such sexist persecution of unmarried women with sex lives is common, despite it being widely acceptable for men to have multiple mistresses. Arenas helps support Félix, who was barred from acting, with the UNEAC salary he still draws.

Arenas and Félix receive no response to their housing application, forcing Arenas to continue living at his aunt’s, where the police surveil him more and more. Félix becomes pregnant and her and Arenas’s financial situation becomes more desperate. Arenas and his friends consider various ways to escape Cuba. All such plans require some amount of help from another person and thus the risk of that person being an informant for State Security. Arenas identifies the distrust this bred among close friends as one of the most pernicious, dehumanizing effects of Castroism.

In the summer of 1973, Arenas and his friend Pepe Malas have sex with a group of young men they meet on Guanabo Beach. The men steal Arenas and Malas’s bags, and Malas calls the police. When caught, the men accuse Arenas and Malas of fondling them, and the police arrest Arenas and Malas, letting the other men go. The police release Arenas on bail pending his trial. Arenas learns that the police are using his arrest as a pretext to prosecute him for his dissident writing and that Agata is helping them build their case.

Following a lover’s suggestion, Arenas decides to escape Cuba before his trial by swimming to the US naval base in Guantánamo. He tells Prado and Malas—who, in contrast to Arenas, was only charged with a minor public disturbance—of his plans. Before he can flee, the police arrest, interrogate, and beat Arenas.