Before Night Falls

Arenas prides himself for remaining firm in his commitment to his moral and artistic integrity, refusing to capitulate to Castro as so many other Cuban artists do. Arenas develops this dual sense of integrity early in his literary career after meeting Lima and Piñera through the UNEAC. Both men instill in him the belief that under a dictatorship, writers are responsible for maintaining their integrity and writing against power, not for it. This sense of integrity defines Arenas’s life and works.

Artists face two threats under Castro: destruction through persecution and corruption through political favor (304). The former threatens the artist themselves, the latter threatens their integrity. Many writers sacrifice their moral and artistic integrity out of fear for their safety. Arenas believes that Cuban writers are responsible for fighting the threat of Castro with their work, seeing this artistic creation as a crucial part of the dissident movement: “The greatest danger to the regime was the large number of young people who became followers of dissident writers, and for that reason, those writers had to be demoralized so they could not become symbols; they had to be humiliated and cut down” (423). Artistic integrity serves a crucial role in the ideological war against Castro, who uses his various repressive apparatuses—State Security, the First Congress of Education and Culture, UNEAC, etc.—to enforce ideological orthodoxy. Without writers as voices of dissent, it becomes easier for Castro to win his ideological war. Such a victory would have profound consequences, making it much harder to even conceive of dissent, to realize that the state is not the ultimate authority on everything.

Arenas’s belief in the importance of literary dissent explains his censure of the many Cuban writers who forsake their duty to dissent; conversely, this belief explains his praise for the writers who maintain their integrity despite the costs. Before Night Falls is, in part, Arenas’s rebuke of all the Cuban and foreign writers who helped Castro, his record of the many who did what was easy rather than what was right, who sold their integrity for personal gain and pretended they did nothing wrong. The book is also his testament to the possibility and necessity of dissent and his commemoration of those writers who maintained their integrity despite the consequences. In Miami, Arenas sees a Cuban writer he admires, Lydia Cabrera. After Castro’s Revolution, Cabrera forsook a life of privilege and went into exile to write. The consequences of her commitment to artistic integrity are dire: “One of the greatest women in our history, she was completely forsaken and forgotten, or else surrounded by people who had never read a single one of her books” (507). Many Cuban authors are forced into oblivion through censorship and persecution—effectively an attempt to erase them from history. Arenas fights Castro’s attempt to erase them, pulling them from oblivion to commemorate their rebellious spirit. In doing so, he does what Piñera and Lima taught him writers should do: oppose power.