Reinaldo Arenas
Persecuted in Cuba as a gay man and dissident, he escaped in 1980 and wrote his memoir “Before Night Falls” while dying of AIDS.
Reinaldo Arenas grew up in poverty in the countryside of eastern Cuba. As a teenager he joined Fidel Castro’s revolution. In Havana he worked at the national library and began to write; his novel “Hallucinations” (1966) about a Mexican friar was smuggled abroad and won acclaim in France.
But as a gay man and an independent writer, Arenas came into conflict with the revolutionary government, which sent homosexuals to forced labour camps and censored critical writers. His books could not appear in Cuba. In 1973 he was arrested, and he spent two years in the notorious El Morro prison.
In 1980, during the Mariel boatlift, the Cuban government let “undesirables”, including gay people, leave the country. Arenas escaped to the United States and lived in New York, where he wrote his five-novel cycle “The Pentagony”.
Sick with AIDS, he dictated his memoir “Before Night Falls”, a passionate account of desire, repression and freedom; it was filmed in 2000 with Javier Bardem. In December 1990 he took his own life in New York, aged 47. In his farewell letter he blamed Fidel Castro for his suffering and that of his people.