An Inconvenient Corpse
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The two most interesting chapters are probably the first, in which Olivares recounts the incredible story of Arenas’ life, and the last, a dissection of the way in which the Cuban literary establishment has dealt with this writer who remains, after his death, what one essayist called “the most inconvenient corpse in Cuban literature.” Why? Perhaps because appended to Before Night Falls is a suicide note Arenas sent to his closest friends that says in part: “Persons near me are in no way responsible for my decision. There is only one person I hold accountable: Fidel Castro.”

It was his rejection of the Revolution that got Arenas exiled from Cuba and, you could argue, led to his death a decade later, since he arrived in Miami in 1980, just in time for the AIDS epidemic, a case of bad timing if there ever was one. At least that’s the indictment in his suicide letter: “The sufferings of exile, the pain of being banished from my country, the loneliness, and the diseases contracted in exile would probably never have happened if I had been able to enjoy freedom in my country.”

Arenas had been trying to get out of Cuba since going to sea in an inner tube in 1974, and later attempting to sneak into the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay. After that, he was imprisoned in El Morro, the Spanish fort that guards Havana’s Harbor, and ended up living the rest of his time in Cuba as a no-persona, erased from the official list of Cuban writers, which is why foreign admirers who came to Cuba to meet him could not. Arenas was finally able to leave only because Castro decided to unload onto the United States the Cubans who had stormed the Peruvian Embassy in 1980 in an attempt to gain asylum, along with a large batch of criminals, people with mental problems, and homosexuals. “I left,” Arenas writes in his memoir, “as just another faggot, not as a writer.”

Arenas grew up poor on a farm in eastern Cuba where his mother moved in with her extended family after his father deserted them when Arenas was only a few months old. Before Night Falls begins with rhapsodic descriptions of Nature (and ends with a threnody to the moon), then moves on to his attempts to join the rebels fighting the dictator Fulgencio Batista, his subsequent education by the Revolution (as an agricultural accountant), his move to Havana, where he gained attention at a story-telling contest at the National Library, his mentoring by the older gay writers Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima, his first novels (published abroad), his growing disenchantment with the Revolution, and his imprisonment by the Castro government, after which he lived as a homeless person until the Mariel Boatlift and his move to New York, where he ended up in Hell’s Kitchen, contracted AIDS, and finally killed himself (with alcohol and pills).

Arenas’ origins were so rural and so poor that as a child he and his playmates would eat dirt—the land itself—though the attachment to Cuba, which never left him, was not only to the island but to its men. Cuba for Arenas was a paradise of sexual encounters with “real” men. Running through Before Night Falls is an almost anarchic sexual appetite that triumphs in the most unlikely places, the most dangerous situations. This memoir establishes its priorities on the very first page, when the middle-aged narrator says that, upon entering a men’s room in the New York subway, “Nobody paid any attention to me, and the erotic games going on proceeded undisturbed. Right then and there I thought that the best thing for me was to die.” Even near the end of his life, suffering with AIDS, he wrote to friends: “Yesterday I rode my bike in Central Park. I even had an indecent proposition from a huge black man that unfortunately I cannot accept anymore.”

Such lines—simultaneously hilarious and bleak, campy and tragic—are vintage Arenas: a brilliant writer who also seems to have been a major size queen who could not stop looking at men’s baskets even while fleeing Castro’s police. Arenas’ problem was that the Revolution had no use for him as a writer or homosexual. As the Cuban folklorist Samuel Feijóo put it in the newspaper El Mundo: “no homosexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter for men, a matter of fists and not of feathers, of courage and not of cowardice, of integrity and not of intrigue, of creative valor and not of spineless surprises. … True revolutionary literature is not, and will never be, written by sodomites.” (That it was, of course, the sodomite Arenas who exemplified courage, integrity, and creative valor, is the theme of Olivares’ book—and Before Night Falls, for that matter.) Once Arenas escaped to the U.S., however, his happiness was short-lived, his work ignored, he felt, because of the pro-Castro bias of the literary and academic establishment, which did not want to hear criticism of the Revolution. He became disillusioned with life in New York, and he missed Cuba. A man in exile no longer exists, he wrote, because what he has truly left behind in his home country is himself.

Something else that Arenas left behind in Cuba is the chief subject of Olivares’ analysis: the father Arenas never knew. One day when Arenas was five, he was walking with his mother by a river when a man approached him, despite the rocks his mother had started throwing, patted Arenas on the head, and gave him a few pesos: it was Arenas’ father. It was the only time he saw the man, but this is the primal scene Olivares uses in his middle chapters to psychoanalyze Arenas’ work. Reading a Freudian analysis of literature is a bit like watching a man do a jigsaw puzzle or construct the White House out of Legos, but in Olivares’ hands it yields interesting results, especially when he weaves together, as his subtitle promises, concepts of sexuality and parenthood in Cuban culture and history. For Arenas, Havana in the 1960s—where long hair apparently meant what it did in Haight-Ashbury—was a golden age of sexual liberation that he suspected was triggered by the parental strictures against long hair and homosexuality during the Castro regime. Here, at least, is Arenas’ own Freudian analysis of Cuban culture in one of his interviews:

In the world in which I lived, the mother had a patriarchal role. The father was an adventurer who would simply conceive you and disappear (as happened in my case) but the mother was always a constant: the one who kept watch over you, rocked you, nursed you, punished you, criticized you, praised you. … In sum, the one who would forgive you or condemn you. And that is evident in what I have written. I also believe that there is an oedipal character … between Cubans in general and their mothers. The mother embodies, in the end, absolute power. In the various forms that dictatorships have had in Cuba, the dictator partly takes on the role of the mother of the people. There is, as a result, a kind of sentimental blackmail: an authority almost maternal. That is what we see at present: how the dictatorship becomes a maternal power that manages us, guides us, organizes us, tells us how we must comb our hair, how we must dress, how we must speak, what we must do, what we must not do.

“Arenas,” writes Olivares, “is a case in point. … Having been denied the love of a father, Arenas redirects his filial love toward his fatherland. And in the same way that his mother, in the eyes of the innocent child, comes between him and his father, an equally repressive figure, Fidel Castro, comes between Arenas and his fatherland. Thus, for Arenas, it proves difficult if not impossible to distinguish between Castro and the castrating mother.”

In other words: Castro is Mommie Dearest! And why not? The line between machismo and effeminacy is so thin; between dictators, with their mirrored sunglasses, their epaulettes encrusted with gold braid, and drag queens. (In Before Night Falls Arenas will not even grant Castro any military prowess. The Cuban middle class hated Batista, Arenas wrote, because he was black, whereas Castro was white and educated, like them. As for the Revolution itself, what Revolution? Batista fled, and The New York Times anointed Castro as the island’s savior.) On the other hand, along with the black humor of his Freudian interpretation, Olivares elucidates the importance Arenas attached to what he called “the book of books”—The Iliad—especially the scene in which Priam asks Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body. A father’s loss of a son is the mirror image of a son’s loss of his father; when Arenas died, there was a copy of The Iliad on his bedside table.

After Arenas’ death, the Cuban literary establishment didn’t know what to do with him, though they soon found a way to extract from his work the lessons the Revolution demanded. “When Cuban writers die in exile,” Olivares says, they go through in their country what Rafael Rojas calls a “recovery ceremony,” a process that mutilates their intellectual biographies. Accordingly, Reinaldo Arenas is now included in the pantheon of national literary figures, but his membership in this select group has been limited to a “dismembered”Arenas. He is remembered primarily as the author of … novels that he wrote in the1960s and that do not openly condemn the Cuban Revolution and its leaders.

The reason is simple: “Pro-Castro Cubans want to promote a ‘safe’ Arenas, not the author of politically volatile works.”

One only has to read Before Night Falls to see how contemptuous Arena was, right to the end: “Ours is a national history of betrayals, uprisings, desertions, conspiracies, riots, coups d’état,” he wrote, “all of them provoked by infinite ambition, abuse, despair, false pride, and envy.” And: “Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unæsthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.”

To be sure, Arenas had a quarrel not just with Castro but with homosexuality: “I loved someone and wanted that person to love me,” he wrote in his memoir. “I did not believe that one had to search, unceasingly, to find in other bodies what one body had already provided. I wanted a permanent love, wanted what perhaps my mother had always yearned for, that is, a man, a friend, someone we could belong to and who would be ours. But it was not to be, and I do not think that is possible, at least not in the gay world. The gay world is not monogamous.” Modern homosexuality he found meaningless. “Homosexual militancy has gained considerable rights for free-world gays. But what has been lost is the wonderful feeling of meeting heterosexual or bisexual men who would get pleasure from possessing another man and who would not, in turn, have to be possessed. … The ideal in any sexual relationship is finding one’s opposite, and therefore the homosexual world is now something sinister and desolate; we almost never get what we most desire.”

In Before Night Falls names are named and people condemned as spies, traitors, informers, suck-ups, and murderers—which makes it no surprise to learn that Arenas was touchy in real life. Olivares, who first interviewed Arenas as a fan shortly after his escape, brings a calm objective tone to his subject:

To attribute all his misfortunes … to a political conspiracy against him, as Arenas tended to do, is simplistic. Arenas’ anti-Castro stance and his obstinacy on matters Cuban indeed accounted for many of his adversities in exile, but undoubtedly so did his caustic temperament. Arenas’ close friends, who readily referred to his generosity, kindness, and humility, acknowledge that Arenas could be explosive, paranoid, and belligerent. … Unable to find solace or understanding, and attributing roadblocks that he encountered in his personal and professional life to the machinations, jealousies, and pettiness of others, Arenas found revenge in the power of the word, alienating friends and foes alike.

Of course, there is a paradox in this story of Arenas’ tumultuous and tragic life. “It is undeniable that Arenas the writer was a product of the Cuban Revolution,” Olivares writes. And yet: “Ostracized since the 1960s but more forcefully after the Revolution’s Stalinist turn in the early 1970s, Arenas officially ceased to exist.” With that implacable cruelty of posthumous glory that Life so often provides, he did not live to see his great success, or the fate he wished for his country. “Cuba will be free,” reads the last line of Arenas’ suicide letter. “I already am.” The thought of Arenas writing these words, of riding his bicycle in Central Park, past the black man whose invitation he refused because he knew he was infected with a disease he had contracted in exile from his country, makes one wish that one could reach back through time to inform Arenas of his posthumous fame.

As for Olivares’ book, “intertextuality,” “oedipal telemachy,” “privilege” used as a verb, and lines like “These instances of Elisa’s bodily disfigurations narratologically have a proleptic function” are not for the faint of heart. But what academic jargon there is never becomes irritating, because Olivares writes so well and because he has given us a fascinating view of Cuban history, culture, and sexuality that should, if nothing else, send one back to that thrilling jeremiad, Before Night Falls.

Andrew Holleran’s latest book is Chronicles of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath.