Before Night Falls - Reinaldo Arenas
Penguin UK 1994
Before Night Falls is a memoir by the Cuban poet, playwright and novelist, Reinaldo Arenas, (1943-1990,) a gay man, living under the Castro regime.
He was born in 1943 when Battista was still in power but Castro took over when he was a teenager by which time he had joined the rebels, not out of conviction, but rather to get food. He grew up in what he describes as 'absolute poverty,' in rural Cuba where he lived with his mother, grandparents and countless aunts and their children. Their home where they farmed in the north of the Island was 'a hut with a thatched roof and a dirt floor.' Hunger defined their lives but Arenas describes, with great economy and simplicity, the beauty of their rural life, its mythological richness, and the vitality of living so close to nature even though it was wrought of necessity owing to grinding poverty, not by choice. His accounts of their close connection with the night skies, the weather, and the sea are particularly memorable.
This part of his life - agonisingly difficult but also enchanted in some ways - ended when he moved to a nearby city for work. Quite quickly - after a couple of years - he moved on to Havana where he developed both his writing and his broader education. Although he could not get his writing published in Cuba, having been a critic of the regime from the outset, he did, though the contacts he built, get a job at the National Library.
Arenas was primarily an autodidact. His mother taught him to read and write - she herself having been taught by her mother. Arenas had some schooling as a child and later at a Castro style polytechnic where he got, in his words, his 'communist indoctrination.' His most useful learning, however, came from the books he read and the people he met as an adult, particularly other writers.
He was persecuted by the regime not only because he was a writer and dissident but, perhaps above all, for his homosexuality. His account is harrowing at times. He was captured and put in one of Castro's notorious concentration and labour camps and later was imprisoned in similar conditions.
Again, in the simplest language he tells of the absolute horror: the violence and depravity of life in prison with little or no hope.
No less harrowing is the endless grind, even when not in prison or a concentration or labour camp, of being constantly pursued, always watching, always in fear, always escaping from one catastrophe only to be confronted by another. This litany of oppression is told so lightly that the reader is the spared the plunge into the depths of depression that must surely accompany such experiences.
The horror, both in and out of prison, is always interspersed with laughter, love, sex, intimacy and friendship. He brings tenderness to the most unlikely situations and never seems to lose his potential for loving his fellow humans - both men and women. His romantic and sexual encounters are reserved for men but he also acknowledges his many close friendships with women.
As a portrait of Cuba during the 1960s and 70s it is illuminating in the worst possible way. I had no idea of the levels of poverty and real starvation experienced by most Cubans for most of those twenty years and probably longer. The 1980s was the first of the large exoduses by boat from the island to Miami but I doubt conditions improved much. It is also a revealing account of the depravity that, in the end, is visited on almost everyone living in a brutal totalitarian regime: palpable fear causes almost everyone becomes an informant in the end.
Before Night Falls ends with a searing indictment of the Western Left's 'Useful Idiots,' those many professors, writers, artists and, yes, even gay male activists, who visited Cuba, cosied up to Castro, and who continue, to this day, to speak and write in glowing terms of the Cuban regime.
Arenas also has much to say about the power of art and beauty in a dictatorship. It is a book that demonstrates the warmth of human resilience even in the most devastating circumstances. Far from leaving the reader feeling condemned to despair, it elevates and inspires.