Before Night Falls

“I think the splendor of my childhood was unique because it was absolute poverty but also absolute freedom; out in the open, surrounded by trees, animals, apparitions, and people who were indifferent toward me.”

Like much of his life, Arenas’s childhood is defined by the dissonant combination of freedom and privation. Deprived of parental love, he becomes independent from a young age, losing himself in the natural harmony of the jungle. In recollection, Arenas’s childhood is a time of enchantment and mystery as well as of loneliness and turmoil.

“To see all those naked bodies, all those exposed genitals, was a revelation to me: I realized without a doubt, that I liked men.”

This defining moment in Arenas’s sexuality occurs when he is six-years-old walking by the river with his grandmother. The naked group of teenaged boys bathing in the river awakens him to his desire for men. The image of these naked boys imprints itself in Arenas’s mind.

“[H]e stuck his penis into me and later, at his request, I stuck mine into him while flies and other insects kept buzzing around us, apparently wanting to participate in the feast. When it was all over, I felt completely guilty but not entirely satisfied. I could not help but feel very much afraid. It seemed to me that we had done something terrible, that in some way I had condemned myself for the rest of my life.”

The first time Arenas has sex with a boy is when he has sex with his cousin Orlando as children. Afterward, Arenas is terrified that someone will discover the act and punish him. He subsequently avoids sex with men for years, remaining sexually repressed until his late teens. His experience of guilt indicates that even at eight-years-old Arenas knows about the consequences of having sex with men in Cuba’s anti-gay culture. His guilt is unlikely to stem from awareness of the taboo of incest because he previously played sexual games with his female cousin Dulce María. This sexual encounter with Orlando resembles many of Arenas’s later encounters in that, for secrecy’s sake, they occur close to nature, hidden amongst the florae.

“I think I always had a huge sexual appetite. Not only the mares, sows, hens, or turkeys but almost all animals were objects of my sexual passion, including dogs.”

In the countryside where Arenas grows up, bestiality is common, especially among pre-pubescent and pubescent boys. His friends and his cousins all have sex with various animals. The voracious sexual appetite Arenas shows as a child foreshadows his insatiable sexual appetite later in life with men

“Night in the countryside where I grew up (a countryside that no longer exists, except in these recollections) was also a musical realm, a magical and endless orchestration, vibrating everywhere, chiming into infinity. And the sky’s radiance was not constant but an unending blaze of changing hues and streaks, stars that burst and disappeared (after having existed for millions of years) just to enrapture us for a few moments.

This passage differs from much of Before Night Falls in its lyrical style, which expresses the experience of the natural harmony and wonder Arenas felt in the countryside at night. The imagery evokes a world without distinction between the human, the natural, and the cosmic, a world replete with meaning. Arenas perceives the transformation of the countryside during the daytime—during which it can appear quite harsh—and the nighttime—when this blazing, starry dome appears overhead—as nothing short of magical.

“There was a surge of enthusiasm, great fanfare, and a new terror.”

Arenas’s description of the first days of Castro’s rule in 1959 indicates that the Revolution will not proceed as promised. After suffering a reign of terror under Batista as he starved the country and executed citizens in the war against Castro to intimidate opposition, Arenas now sees “a new terror:” the hunt for, and execution of, hundreds of people accused of helping Batista. These executions enjoy almost unanimous domestic support in the first years of the Revolution because Cubans want vengeance. However, these executions never end and the public opinion of them changes—they become political murders of people who oppose the Revolution.

“It is almost impossible for human beings to imagine so many calamities befalling them at the same time; we had suffered continuous dictatorships, incessant abuse, and unrelenting mistreatment by those in power. This was our opportunity, the opportunity for the lower classes.”

Arenas explains the reason Cubans were initially naïve about the true nature of the new terror that Castro initiated. Optimism overwhelms sober-mindedness and Cubans unwittingly support another future dictator in Castro. This is also Arenas’s explanation for his own support of Castro as a teenager: He saw the Revolution as a means to escape poverty, a promise to improve Cuba for poor people like him.

“I wanted a permanent love, wanted what perhaps my mother had always yearned for; that is, a man, a friend, someone we could belong to and who would be ours. But it was not to be, and I do not think this is possible, at least not in the gay world”

Arenas’s first breakup with a more experienced man named Raúl devastates Arenas, whose love for Raúl was unrequited. There is a stark difference between his view of love as an 18-year-old having his first sexual encounters with a man as an adult and his view of love later in his youth. With Raúl, Arenas associates sex with love and wants a loving, monogamous relationship. Later, Arenas comes to view sex as something separate from love and love as a connection that can exist between two non-monogamous people, such as himself and Lázaro.

“Those late afternoons by the sea are unique in Cuba, particularly in Havana, where the sun falls into the sea like a giant balloon; everything seems to change at dusk, cast under a brief and mysterious spell. There is the smell of brine, of life, of the tropics. The waves, almost reaching my feet, ebbed and left a golden reflection on the sand.”

Again, Arenas employs a literary style to capture Cuba’s natural splendor. Throughout Before Night Falls, such descriptions stand as islands of idyllic moments amidst a sea of persecution. This description of the sunset recalls the way in which the fog or the nighttime would transform the harsh countryside into a magical, ethereal paradise.

“It was the end of an era, underground and defiant, but still full of creativity, eroticism, intelligence, and beauty.”

Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a period of “Super-Stalinism”—i.e., extreme persecution—begins in Cuba as Castro initiates a nationwide forced labor campaign toward a sugarcane harvest. This marks the end of the ‘60s in Cuba, which for Arenas and many other young Cubans was a decade of relative freedom.

“That vital man, who had written beautiful poetry, apologized for everything he had done, for his entire previous work, throwing the blame upon himself, branding himself a despicable coward and traitor.”

At UNEAC, Arenas witnesses the poet Herbert Padilla, destroyed by a month of torture under State Security, recant his anti-revolutionary views and works. This public humiliation is among the worst for the dissident literary community in Havana, to whom Padilla was a hero. The forced conversion of this inveterate anticommunist horrifies Arenas because it shows how much power the State wields.

“And when the plane lifted off, we watched it vanish in the clouds, full of people who were able to leave, to hate the system, to say what they wanted, to buy themselves a pair of shoes whenever they wished to. But we had to stay behind, and had to stand in line then for a long time, waiting for a bus to return to Havana. We would look sadly at one another in our rustic clothes, our skin burned by the sun and our vitamin deficiencies.”

Arenas’s description of watching foreigners, such as the Camachos, leave Cuba after their visits evokes an image of prisoners watching birds fly up from the prison yard into freedom. Under Castro, Cuba becomes essentially a large prison in which many, such as Arenas, are forbidden from leaving, condemned to a pallid life on the island.

“I see her even now, sad and resigned, passing that broom over the wooden porch, searching the horizon, perhaps still waiting for her lover, her fiancé, the man who seduced her one day and who never came back or wanted nothing more to do with her.”

The image of his mother sweeping the porch becomes symbolic in Arenas’s mind. When she sweeps it is not to clean but to have something to do: She is merely going through the motions, wiling away the hours of her life in resignation to her misfortune. This image comes to encapsulate his mother’s resigned attitude.

“I smashed the bottle of rum and with the pieces of broken glass slashed my wrists. I thought it was the end, of course, and lay down in a corner of the empty house, slowly losing consciousness. I felt that this was death.”

After escaping jail but failing to escape Cuba on an inner tube, Arenas experiences one of the lowest moments of his life. He is a fugitive who knows he will be caught and likely be imprisoned for years; he prefers death to imprisonment. This is the first of three times in the book that Arenas attempts death by suicide.

“I did not want to recant anything, I did not think I had to recant anything; but after three months at State Security, I signed the confession.”

Like many writers before and after him, Arenas capitulates under duress to State Security’s demands and recants his anti-revolutionary activity. His confession after so many years of staunch commitment to his principles attests to the near-absolute power State Security wielded in Cuba. 

“I was alone in my misery; no one could witness my misfortune in that cell. The worst misfortune was to continue living after all that, after having betrayed myself and after having been betrayed by almost everybody else.”

Arenas feels disheartened and lonely following his confession to State Security. This confession devastates Arenas’s spirit, after he prided himself on maintaining his artistic and moral integrity throughout years of intense persecution. This is a crucial moment in Arenas’s life, as his betrayal of his values is not as absolute as he thinks it is. Before his imprisonment, he published a communiqué stating that any future confession he made would be under duress.

“A whole universe died for me when my grandmother died; her death was an end to the possibility of counting on someone who could stop in the middle of a simple conversation to call upon God; a kind of wisdom disappeared, a completely different way of looking at life. I wanted to cry, seeing that face with which a whole era of witches, ghosts, and spirits would disappear, with which all my childhood, the best part of my life, would disappear. But I could not cry.”

Arenas feels that with his grandmother dies his magical, inspirational childhood. His inability to cry suggests that he has not fully accepted her death and mourned her loss. His grandmother inhabited a metaphysically rich world utterly distinct from the fallen world of persecution he finds himself in as an adult.

“This was too much: I could not even attend the funeral of my dead friend.”

After Arenas’s close friend, the writer Virgilio Piñera dies, State Security forbids him from attending the funeral. Arenas’s defiance of their injunction and his graveside denunciation of the suspicious circumstances of Piñera’s death attest to his loyalty to, and love for, his friend. State Security oversteps the bounds of what they can enforce. Their only recourse is to increase their surveillance of Arenas, since for fear of renewed international backlash they cannot arrest him again.

“It should be remembered that there were 135,500 people in that exodus; the majority were people like myself; all they wanted was to live in a free world, to work and regain their lost humanity.”

The Mariel boat lift was a mass exodus of Cubans from the port of Mariel to the US from 1980 to 1981 that Castro allowed to expel people he deemed undesirable. Contrary to this pejorative label, Arenas highlights that the marielitos (those who fled via Mariel) were people who simply wanted to live in freedom. The sheer number of marielitos attests to the fact that discontent spread far beyond Arenas and the literary community.

“I scream, therefore I exist.”

Arenas’s reformulation of Descartes’s famous principle, “I think, therefore I am,” redefines what it means to be human. Under Castro’s dictatorship, thinking alone is not sufficient to “exist;” to be a full human being it is also necessary to be able to express oneself freely, especially to express one’s suffering—to scream. Arenas emigrates to the US to scream, i.e., to declare the suffering he was prevented from expressing in Cuba.

“The exile is a person who, having lost a loved one, keeps searching for the face he loves in every new face and, forever deceiving himself, thinks he has found it.”

Arenas describes exile not as freedom but as a perpetual state of loss: In escaping persecution, Arenas also loses his home. Like a loved one, his home is irreplaceable. This condemns him to a peripatetic existence that is a continuation of the restlessness that plagued him throughout his life. Arenas never finds a true home, can never ground himself and shed the feeling of restlessness because his only true home, Cuba, is poisoned by authoritarianism.

“It is hard to communicate, in this country or in any other, if you come from the future.”

This enigmatic statement expresses the alienation and isolation that exile imposes, the barrier it erects between the exile and those who do not share their history. Arenas’s past in Cuba haunts and entices him in a way that makes it feel as if it is always present. Nevertheless, he finds himself stranded in “the future,” in a place in time separate from his past. This separation makes it near impossible to communicate with others the past suffering he experienced.

“To go to bed and switch off the light has been for me to submit to a totally unknown world, full of delicious as well as sinister promises.”

The nighttime world of dreams remains important to Arenas throughout his life because it is one of the only escapes he has in Cuba. Moreover, in the symbolism of his dreams Arenas plumbs the depths of his psyche, learning more about himself. The world of dreams is a distorted reflection of his life, a world that renders the familiar unrecognizable.