Reinaldo Arenas

Reinaldo Arenas (July 16, 1943 – December 7, 1990) was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright who is known as a vocal critic of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution, and the Cuban government. His memoir of the Cuban dissident movement and of being a political prisoner, ''Before Night Falls'', was dictated after his escape to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and published posthumously. Arenas, who was dying of AIDS, killed himself in 1990.

Life

Arenas was born in the countryside of Newport Beach, Aguas Claras, Holguín Province, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín as a teenager. He was six years old when he started school, attending Rural School 91 in Perronales County. There, his interest in boys flourished. He later wrote about his sexual exploration with himself. He talked openly of how the first times he had straight sex, while incomplete, was with his cousin, Dulce Maria. He also shared that his first act of gay sex was at 8 with his cousin Orlando, who was 12. Arenas stated, "In the country, sexual energy generally overcomes all prejudice, repression, and punishment.... Physical desire overpowers whatever feelings of machismo our fathers take upon themselves to instill in us."

After moving to Holguín when he was a teen, Arenas got a job at a guava paste factory. When conditions in the city started to get worse, around 1958, he decided that he wanted to join the guerillas (Castro and his movement). When he was 14, he walked to Velasco, where he met Cuco Sánchez, who took him to the pro-Soviet Cuban guerrilla headquarters in the Sierra Gibara. A guerilla commander, Eddy Suñol, interviewed Arenas and said, "We have plenty of guerrillas; what we need is weapons."

After ten days with the guerilla, Arenas went back to Holguín with the intention of killing a guard and taking his weapon. When he made it back to the city, he went home to see his grandparents who were not so happy to see him. Because he made the mistake of leaving a note saying that he was going to join the guerillas, the women who lived with his grandparents spread the news like wildfire. Fulgencio Batista's secret police, the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities, were on the lookout for him. His brief trip home made him realize that he could not stay and so he trekked back to Velasco to the rebel encampment. It now had to accept him.

When he was 16, he was awarded a scholarship at La Pantoja, the Batista military camp that had been converted into a polytechnic institute. There, one of the most important courses was on Marxist–Leninism. Students had to master ''Manual of the Soviet Academy of Sciences'', ''Manual of Political Economy'' by Pyotr Ivanovich Nikitin, and ''Foundations of Socialism in Cuba'' by Blas Roca Calderio. Arenas graduated as an agricultural accountant but later described his schooling as "communist indoctrination."

The first time that Arenas was in Havana and reported to the ''Hotel Nacional de Cuba''. While in the program, he worked for the National Institute for Agrarian Reform. It was not until around 1963 that Arenas started to live his life as a gay man, but even then, it was still a life in extreme secrecy. He feared ending up in one of the Military Units to Aid Production, which were concentration camps for LGBT people, Christians, and suspected members of the Cuban dissident movement. A relationship with a man named Miguel, who was later arrested and taken to a UMAP camp, was the beginning of Arenas's life of being known as a gay man by the Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

Throughout his life, Arenas became friends with and had relationships with many gay men. He went so far as to say that at one point, he had had sex with at least 5,000 men. He watched as various friends and acquaintances pledged their allegiance to the regime in exchange for safety. They became informers for the government and reported other men, often former friends or relations. The intention was to find gay and bisexual men and either prosecute and jail them or turn them into other informers. The reward for co-operating with the regime was having life being spared. Those who became informers, however, often had to participate in public and very humiliating acts of repudiation that publicly denounced their anti-regime beliefs or their homosexuality.

Arenas watched that happen with Herberto Padilla, who had written a book that was critical of the Cuban Revolution to an official competition. Padilla was arrested in 1971, and after 30 days in a cell, he decided to speak. Various Cuban intellectuals were invited by the state security to hear what he had to say. Padilla stood in front of everyone and apologized for everything that he had done. He painted himself as a coward and a traitor, apologized for his previous work, and threw blame on himself. He publicly denounced his friends and his wife and said that they had counterrevolutionary attitudes. Those whom he named were forced to go to the microphone, accept blame for their actions, and say that they were traitors as well.

In 1963, he moved to Havana

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