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An admired Cuban author and dissident, Reinaldo Arenas told his life story from
beginning to very near its end in 1990 in BEFORE NIGHT FALLS, a disturbing account of the
horrors he faced in Cuba as well as the difficulties he encountered when he finally
escaped from the island.
Like MI MOTO FIDEL, a good portion of BEFORE NIGHT FALLS is devoted to recounting sexual
adventures. A homosexual living under a government that brutally represses those it
considers deviant, Arenas suggests that he had had sex with as many as 5,000 men while he
was still quite young. But while the recounting of his erotic encounters is nearly as
tiresome in BEFORE NIGHT FALLS as in Baker's MI MOTO FIDEL, Arenas's homosexuality is
central to his story because it had much to do with the treatment he received at the hands
of the government --- a government that also despised the fact that he managed to smuggle
manuscripts out of the country and have them published abroad.
The facts of Arenas's life both in and out of Cuban prisons are truly horrifying, and he
told his tale in an unblinking matter–of–fact tone that serves to amplify that
horror. He was equally candid in his observations about the capitalist system into which
he escaped only to find that many publishers who had supported him when he was in Cuba and
couldn't be paid for his work immediately abandoned him when he suggested that he was
entitled to compensation.
"None of this surprised me," he wrote. "I already knew that the capitalist
system was also sordid and money–hungry. In one of my first statements after leaving
Cuba I had declared that, 'the difference between the communist and capitalist systems is
that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to
applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.'"
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS is a powerful document about social injustice, not just in Cuba, but in
the capitalist societies of the West as well.
--- Reviewed by Rob Cline
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