“Homosexual unions are totally lacking in the conjugal dimension, which represents the human and ordered form of sexuality….As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development.”

–from the recent Vatican document on gay unions

“With the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.” –Fidel Castro

I would hazard a guess that mentioning Fidel Castro and homosexuality in my opening line is not a good way of avoiding controversy. The former topic divides a significant portion of the Hispanic communities across the Americas, the latter threatens to become the single most divisive issue on the Canadian socio-political scene. Julian Schnabel’s film Before Night Falls unflinchingly tackled both issues using the autobiography of the Cuban poet-novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Exiled from his homeland for the “anti-revolutionary” crime of being unashamedly homosexual and speaking up for freedom of speech, Arenas was one of the most powerful voices condemning the Castro regime.

A film of many voices, Before Night Falls has some which are beautiful—Arenas’ poetry in its original Spanish (“I am the angry and lonely child of always….”)—and none which are comfortable. This is not a story of the lives of gay men which caters to the viewer using the traditional overlay of humor. I use the word “caters” advisedly. From the original La Cage aux Folles, to its American remake as The Birdcage, to Priscilla of the Desert, to television’s Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, gay men have made have made significant yet fragile strides in widespread public acceptance. The unknown, the unfamiliar is the greatest source of fear and the media have done a good job of making us laugh with gays. The fragility comes from the fact that when the humor is dropped for more serious demands—inclusion of gay families in children’s books, adoption by homosexual couples, same-sex marriage—walls come crashing down hard. As Andrew Sullivan recently wrote in a fine essay in Time magazine (“Beware the Straight Backlash”): “It seems as if heterosexuals are willing to tolerate homosexuals, but only from positions of power.”

Reinaldo Arenas and the gay community of Havana never even got to the tolerance-from-a-position-of-power phase. They went directly to backlash. Homosexuality was an “infection.” For a fleeting moment, like the “Czech Spring” before the Russian tanks moved in, it seemed that the Castro revolution might be accompanied by a sexual revolution. There was a sense of being freed from all repressions. The gay scene moved out of the closets and onto the streets and beaches. It didn’t take the new government long to notice and to react. If we can experience vicious backlash in a country with gay Anglican priests, gay MPs, gay pride parades, and a clear Charter of Rights and Freedoms, imagine the reprisals in a country looking to the Soviet Union as a role model in dealing with dissidents.

At first merely hassled by the police and military, Arenas was later arrested on trumped-up charges of molesting minors. After a quick jailbreak and a period of life on the run, he was recaptured and sent to Havana’s infamous El Morro prison for almost two years. Ironically, the exaggerated charges against him laid on by state officials gave him a cachet of danger that helped him survive his initiation into prison life. When inmates later learned he was a writer, Arenas became their voice to the outside world. He continued to smuggle his own writings out by any means possible (including an anatomically-gifted transvestite named Bon Bon, played by the ever-unpredictable Johnny Depp). Other friends and ex-lovers were not so fortunate. They were brutalized, shot while “escaping,” disappeared into “re-education” camps, their voices silenced. By 1980, when Castro approved a mass exodus of “undesirables” including criminals, the insane, and homosexuals, Arenas had seen the writing on the wall. In one of Before the Fall’s most disturbing scenes, Arenas “confesses” to being a homosexual to an army officer responsible for approving exit visas. The officer questions him with the brutally intimate distaste of a medieval Inquisitor. The tenuousness of survival under a dictatorship is brought home by that fact that a minor spelling change to his name, scribbled at the last moment by Arenas himself on his exit paper as he’s approaching the boat for Florida, probably saves his life when authorities use their lists of deportees for a last-minute settling of scores.

I don’t think Arenas ever imagined the United States to which he was fleeing to be a paradise. There’s the initial euphoria of freedom, lying on the hood of car, being driven through the first flakes of a New York snowfall. Then there’s the long trajectory of poverty, statelessness, illness. Arenas died, broken by AIDS and inadequate medical care, in a cheap apartment in New York City. I think he summed up the nature of his exile as well as anyone has ever done when he wrote that: “The difference between the communist and the capitalist system is that when they give you a kick in the ass in the communist system you have to applaud; in the capitalist system you can scream.”

Arenas’ true paradise was the rural Cuba of his childhood, with his mother and the lush green forests and the heavy rains and the waters of the sea that fed his imagination: “The splendour of my childhood was unique because of its absolute poverty and absolute freedom out in the open surrounded by trees, animals and people who were indifferent toward me.” Before the Fall’s harshest scenes are counterbalanced by these flashbacks to childhood. To the end of his life, Reinaldo saw himself as a “guajiro,” a simple peasant.

Actor Javier Bardem’s performance as Reinaldo is superb—from the preening strut of the successful young writer, to the increasingly paranoid dissident in the authorities’ crosshairs, to the suicidal wraith whose body crumbles under the assault of AIDS-related illnesses. Bardem’s acting is one of the reasons Before Night Falls succeeds in being a tribute to its subject’s life, rather than lament over his death or an anti-Castro diatribe. Bardem’s emotional range is impressive, unflinchingly honest, often discomfiting. There is no sugar-coating of gay relationships here—they are every bit as casual, spontaneous, manipulative, abusive, shallow, and profound as their heterosexual counterparts.

A good deal of the credit for the film’s impact also has to go to director Julian Schnabel (a well-known contemporary artist in his own right, whose previous film had been about Jean-Michel Basquiat). Schnabel has a unique approach to cinematography, editing, and the use of music. Much of the film’s potential bleakness is counterbalanced by a restlessly moving camera, odd high and low camera angles, and full advantage taken of the kinds of color saturations that help give countries such as Cuba and Mexico the sense of being locked into late 50’s or early 60’s time warps. Julian Schnabel also makes use of contemporary documentary footage, and shoots some scenes in a pseudo-documentary style.

And then there’s the music. As harsh as the political or sexual climate might be, this is also the Cuba where the verb “bailar” (to dance) is the eleventh commandment. Schnabel and composer Carter Burwell create swatches of silence interspersed with music-laced tableaux vivants. Faux documentary syncopates into moments of magic realism and hyperrealism. The final effect is one of watching and listening to a kind of brilliant monologue, interspersed with vivid pages from a painter/poet/musician’s scrapbook.

While I don’t quite buy into Arenas’ passionate anti-Castroism (Were gays or dissidents in Cuba any less persecuted under the Batista regime? Reinaldo’s grandfather packs up the family, moves to the city, and never speaks again after Reinaldo’s teacher tells his family he has a sensitivity to poetry!), the fact that eight of his nine novels had to be published abroad highlights the limitations of one-man, one-party rule. Despite virulent homophobia, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg were not prophets without honour in their homeland and managed to be credited with “full human development.” It is the paradox of democracy that Reinaldo Arenas understood so well.

Looking Back & Second Thoughts

With all of the time that has passed since I first watched Before Night Falls, I’m no further ahead when it comes to understanding the Cuban revolution or the treatment of dissidents and homosexuals in Cuba. I’ve never read a biography of Fidel Castro, nor have I read a detailed history of Cuba in the 20^th century. I really should make an attempt to fill these gaps in my education. As an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a summary of attitudes towards homosexuality in Cuba, and I’m attaching the result below. It makes for interesting reading.

I also confess to not having read any of Reinaldo Arenas’s fiction in the years since I wrote my review. I’m currently half way through my copy of Before Night Falls, and any comments I have to make here result from this reading. Arenas’s memoir stands as a both a classic memoir of a certain kind of gay lifestyle (sexually voracious, utterly uninhibited, potentially self-destructive) with which I have had little contact in my own life outside of a couple of casual acquaintances and the novels of William Burroughs, and a passionate denunciation of all things Castro. Arenas is the voice of all of those refugees who have risked their lives to escape a Cuba they see as totalitarian and creatively & socially asphyxiating. I’m including some passages from Before Night Falls that capture both Arenas’s lifestyle choices and his disgust with Castro and the revolution.

The one observation I will make from reading his memoirs is that Arenas lets his bitterness and his hatred of Castro blind him to the horrors experienced by so many others during the course of recent Central and South American history. I’m much more familiar with the histories of countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, and Argentina than I am with that of Cuba, and was shocked to read claims by Arenas that he “proved that [Castro’s] dictatorship was worse than Pinochet’s,” that “the leader [Castro] who had fought against Batista was now a dictator much worse than Batista, as well as a mere puppet of the Stalinist Soviet Union,” and that “as a country Cuba has produced scoundrels, criminals, demagogues, and cowards in numbers disproportionate to its population.” These statement might go down well with Republican extremists in the U.S., but I believe they demonstrate how one’s own obsessive hatred can utterly blind one to the sufferings of others. The surviving families of the executed and disappeared in Chile and Argentina, and of the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, would likely not find evil “disproportionately” active in Cuba. Even Arenas’s repeated use of the term “concentration camp” to describe the detention centers for Cuban dissidents is deliberately incendiary in a way that devalues the horrors of the Nazi genocide. Arenas asserts that it was the Castro regime that doubled down on persecution of homosexuals, yet I find it difficult to believe that life for gays was ever easy or safe in the Spanish culture of machismo that reigned in much of Central and South America. I suspect that Castro targeted homosexuals as much for their poltical dissidence as for their sexuality.

That said, both Arenas’s memoir and the film based on it remain powerful documents. The suffering and sacrifices were real, the commitment to transforming life into literature absolute, and the descriptions of a certain kind of gay lifestyle utterly unapologetic. Javier Badem’s portrayal of Arenas is one of his finest. This was his first Oscar nomination as a leading actor. He’s had two other nominations, and in 2008 took home the hardware for No Country for Old Men. Director Julian Schnabel has made only half a dozen films in the past two decades, but all have been memorable.

Arenas grew up in a household of women. For a glimpse of what his life might have been in a less repressive, less revolutionary time & place, the life & novels of Quebec’s Michel Tremblay provide a kind of alternate, life-affirming reality.

Some extracts from Before Night Falls:

I always thought that my family, including my mother, saw me as a weird creature, useless, confused, or crazy; a being outside the framework of their lives. They were probably right.

———-

Our generation, the generation born in the forties, has been a lost generation, destroyed by the communist regime.

The best part of our youth was wasted cutting sugarcane, doing useless guard duty, attending countless speeches (in which the sae litany was repeated over and over), in trying to get around repressive laws; in the incessant struggle to get a decent pair of jeans or a pair of shoes, in hoping to rent a house at the beach or read poetry or have our erotic adventures, in a struggle to escape the constant persecution and arrests by the police….Why this relentless cruelty against us? Why this cruelty against all of us who did not want to be part of the banal tradition and dull daily existence so characteristic of our Island?

I think greatness and dissidence have never been well tolerated by our governments nor by a geat many of our people. It is not in our tradition. The objective has always been to reduce everything to the lowest, most vulgar level. Those who would not conform to that accepted level of mediocrity have always been looked at with hostility and have always been pilloried….

———-

The train was full of recruits; everybody was sexually aroused and having sex in the bathrooms, under the seats, anyplace. Hiram used his foot to masturbate a recruit who seemed to be sleeping on the floor. I was lucky enough to be able to used both hands….To get to the beach was like entering paradise because all the young people wanted to make love; and there were always dozens of them ready to go into the bushes. Many youngmen made love with me in the changing stalls of La Concha public beach, desperate with the knowledge that this instant was, perhaps, unique and had to be enjoyed to the fullest, because at any moment the police could come and arrest us. After all, those of us who were not yet in a concentration camp were privileged; we had to take advantage of our freedom. We looked for men everywhere and we found them….One day we began to take inventory of th men we had slept with until then; this was sometime in 1968. I came to the conclusion, after complicated mathematical calculations, that I had sex with about five thousand men….All dictatorships are sexually repressive and anti-life. All affirmations of life are diametrically opposed to dogmatic regimes. It was logical for Fidel Castro to persecute us, not to let us fuck, and to try to suppress any public display of the life force.

———-

I think that in Cuba there was never more fucking going on than in those years, the decade of the sixties, which was precisely when ll the new laws against homosexuals came into being, when the persecutions started and concentration camps were opened, when the sexual act became taboo while the “new man” was being proclaimed and masculinity exalted. Many of the young men who marched in Revolutionary Square applauding Fidel Castro, and many of the soldier who marched, rifle in hand and with martial expressions, came to our rooms after the parades to cuddle up naked, and show their real selves, sometimes revealing a tenderness and true enjoyment such as I have not been able to find again anywhere else in the world.

———-

I think that th sexual revolution in Cuba actually came about as the result of the existing sexual repression. Perhaps as a protest against the regime, homosexuality began to flourish with ever-increasing defiance. Moreover, since the dictatorship was considered evil, anything it proscribed was seen in a positive light by the nonconformists, who in the sixties were already in the majority. I honestly believe that the concentration camps for homosexuals, and the police officers disguised as willing young men to entrap and arrest homosexuals, actually resulted in the promotion of homosexual activities.

———-

To me, sitting down at the typewriter was, and still is, something extraordinary. I would be inspired (like a pianist) by the rhythm of those keys and they would carry me along. Paragraphs would follow one another like ocean waves, at times more intense, at others less so; sometimes like huge breakers that would engulf page after page, before the next paragraph. My typewriter was an old iron Underwood, but to me it was a magic instrument.

———-

While the shameful spectacle of [Heberto] Padilla’s confession was taking place, Castro’s government was organizing what was called the First Congress of Education and Culture, which significantly concerned everything that opposed what its title implied; it was evident that what he wanted was to put an end to all Cuban culture. Even positions concerning fashion were dictated there. Fashion was being identified as ideological diversionism and a subtle penetration by Yankee imperialism. The cruelest attacks of that congress were unleashed against homosexuals….Public humiliation has always ben one of Castro’s favorite weapons: the degrading of people in front of a public always eager to make fun of any weakness in another, or of any person who has lost favor. It was not enough to be accused; you had to say you were sorry and beat your chest before an audience that would applaud and laugh. After that, shorn and handcuffed, you had to purify yourself of your weaknesses in a sugarcane field or by doing some other agriculture work.

*******************

Unvetted for accuracy, here is ChatGTP’s answer to my request some information about the treatment of homosexuals in Cuba, downloaded on March 17, 2023:

As an AI language model, I don’t have personal opinions, but I can provide you with factual information.

Homosexuals were initially persecuted in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In the early years of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, homosexuality was considered a “bourgeois decadence” and a “sign of mental illness.” As a result, many gay Cubans lost their jobs, were harassed and discriminated against. Homosexuality was also a crime punishable by imprisonment.

However, Cuba’s attitude towards the LGBT community changed over the years. In the early 1990s, as part of a political and economic restructuring known as the “special period,” homosexuality was legalized, and the government began to take steps to protect and respect the rights of the LGBT community. The government also established the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), which advocates for LGBT rights and provides counselling and support for the community.

Today, Cuba is considered one of the more progressive countries in Latin America when it comes to LGBT rights. While there is still some discrimination and harassment, there are legal protections for LGBT individuals, and there is a growing acceptance of the community in Cuban society.

1. “Homosexuality and Revolution in Cuba” by Emily J. Kirk. This academic article explores the treatment of homosexuals in Cuba before and after the revolution, focusing on changes in policy and attitudes towards LGBTQ individuals.

2. “Havana’s Gay Revolution” by Marcia Gallo. This book traces the history of LGBTQ activism in Cuba, from the early 20th century to the present day, and discusses the role of the government in shaping the movement.

3. “Queer Havana: The Margins of Capitalism” by Hannah Schwadron. This ethnographic study examines the experiences of LGBTQ individuals living in Havana and their interactions with the state, including access to healthcare and other social services.

4. “Before Night Falls” by Reinaldo Arenas. This memoir by a gay Cuban writer tells the story of his life under the Castro regime, including his imprisonment and eventual emigration to the United States.

5. “Transitions of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality in Cuba and Beyond” edited by Momin Rahman. This collection of essays includes several chapters that examine the treatment of LGBTQ individuals in Cuba from a range of perspectives, including cultural studies, political science, and sociology.

6. “Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality” by Ian Lumsden. This article discusses the history of negative attitudes towards LGBTQ individuals in Cuban society and the government’s attempts to change these attitudes over time.

7. “Patriarchy and Socialism: Women and Sexuality in Cuba” edited by Linda M. Whiteford and Cecilia L. Green. While not specifically focused on LGBTQ issues, this book includes several chapters that touch on the experiences of queer individuals in Cuba and their relationships with the state.

8. “Homosexuality and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba” by Larry La Fountain-Stokes. This article explores the ways in which LGBTQ issues have been incorporated into Cuba’s revolutionary discourse and the challenges that queer activists continue to face.

9. “The Sexual Traffic in Cuban Nationalism” by David William Foster. This book examines the role of sexuality and gender in Cuban nationalism, with a particular focus on LGBTQ issues and the government response to them.

10. “Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba” by P. Sean Brotherton. While not primarily focused on LGBTQ issues, this book includes a chapter on the ways in which the Cuban healthcare system has addressed LGBTQ health needs over time.