Before Night Falls
SynopsisPlot
Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his suppression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels.
Story
About this book
Before Night Falls is the autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban writer who grew up in rural poverty in eastern Cuba during the 1940s and 1950s. As a teenager, Arenas joined the revolutionary movement against the Batista government, but after the revolution he found himself at odds with the new state. His writing drew official suspicion, and his homosexuality made him a target under laws that treated same-sex relationships as criminal. He was imprisoned and, after his release, barred from publishing in Cuba.
Arenas eventually left the island during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, the mass emigration in which roughly 125,000 Cubans departed for the United States. He settled in New York, where he continued to write while living with serious illness. The memoir, composed in direct and unadorned prose, covers the full arc of his life up to his final years in Manhattan.
The book describes censorship, surveillance, and the specific dangers faced by gay people under a system that policed both art and sexuality. Arenas details how manuscripts were confiscated and how he resorted to smuggling texts out of the country to reach publishers abroad.
