Reinaldo Arenas Before Night Falls

Reinaldo Arenas, author of Before Night Falls, portrays the political, social, and intellectual struggles he had to endure both in Cuba and in the United States. As a teenager in Holguín, Arenas experienced how the current political activity in Fidel Castro’s attempt to overthrow Fulgencio Batista affected their Christmas. Arenas declares although he loved to hear his grandfather mention the topic of Christmas, in 1957, he did not mention it. Arenas discusses that, “[i]t was only the ‘the Bloody Christmas,’ as Bohemia magazine described it, because of the numerous political murders that the government committed that month” (39). Arenas then proceeds to mention how, “most of the dead were those killed by Batista’s henchmen – students; members …show more content…
Once Castro had announced that certain groups of people were eligible to leave the country, one of the groups being homosexuals, one had to go in front of an officer at the police station and prove that he or she was indeed a homosexual. One of the questions the officer would ask if the active or passive role was preferred in the relationship. According to Arenas, “[a] friend of [his] who said he played the active role was not allowed to leave; he had told the truth, but the Cuban government did not look upon those who took the active male role as real homosexuals” (281). This is an explanation why although many men, who were married and even had children, had sex with other men, they were not seen as homosexuals; if these men were participating in the active role, it was both socially acceptable and legal. Once Arenas exiled into the United States, he faced the intellectual struggle even by other intellectuals themselves. For example, Arenas distinctly remembers the banquet in which he attended located at Harvard University in which a German professor states, “[i]n a way I can understand that you may have suffered in Cuba, but I am a great admirer of Fidel Castro and I am very happy with what he has done in Cuba”