Reviewer: Alan Chin
Publisher: Viking
Translated by: Dolores M. Koch
Pages: 317
Before Night Falls is Reinaldo Arenas’s stunning
autobiography—a brave and unrestrained account of his life as a gay writer
under the Castro regime. Arenas, acknowledged as one of the great
twentieth-century Cuban writers, was born in 1943 into a poor, rural Cuban
family. At the age of fifteen, he joined Castro’s guerrillas against the
Batista’s right-wing regime, only to find that corruption and oppression under
Castro was far, far worse.
Early in Reinaldo’s writing career, he had two manuscripts
smuggled out of Cuba and published in France. That simple act branded him a
traitor, and he spent twenty years surviving his “re-education” which included
several years of imprisonment at El Morro prison in Havana. The conditions he describes of El Morro are as
hellish as any Jewish concentration camp, Russian Gulag, or Bangkok prison.
Reinaldo was able to flee Cuba in 1980 during the Mariel
exodus, and lived in New York until losing a battle with AIDS in 1990. Before
Nightfall was begun before Arenas left Cuba and was completed shortly before he
died.
The thing that leaps out at the reader is Arenas’s vivacity,
resilience, and his vast courage. This is a truly inspiring read. This book is
raw, fierce and shocking, yet often touching and lyrical. It is particularly
well written, revealing the horrors of the Castro regime, but more importantly,
the valor of the human spirit. A must read.
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