Before Night Falls

Upon arriving in Key West, Arenas receives basic necessities from a donation center established by Cuban exiles while he waits for immigration to assign him a destination on the mainland. He encounters Juan Abreu and the two embrace. Arenas hears that just hours after his departure, State Security learned of his plans and ransacked El Mosquito looking for him.

Immigration sends Arenas to Miami, where he goes to his uncle’s house. He finds Lázaro waiting there—neither can believe they made it to the US. Arenas informs Jorge and Margarita of his escape and asks for his manuscripts.

In June 1980, Arenas denounces Castro in a conference speech at the International University of Florida. Arenas’s foreign publishers use his denunciation as a pretext to not pay him the money they owe him. His publisher in Uruguay writes a newspaper opinion piece arguing that Arenas condemned himself to ostracism by leaving Cuba. Emmanual Carballo, who published five editions of El mundo alucinante in Mexico, refuses to pay Arenas and tells him he should have stayed in Cuba. As Arenas remarks, Carballo’s refusal “was a very profitable way of exercising his communist militancy” (511). Despite these troubles, Arenas is glad to finally have freedom of expression, the freedom “to scream” (513).

In 1983, Arenas exercises his freedom by traveling through Europe. During his travels he meets a type of person he calls “the Communist Deluxe:” a leftist intellectual who supports Castro (514). To his horror, Arenas discovers that most leftist intellectuals he meets are pro-Castro. After one such Harvard University professor praises Castro at a dinner, Arenas throws the man’s full plate of food against the wall. Some intellectuals try to undermine Arenas in various ways. Arenas realizes that although he has escaped Cuba, he has not escaped “the communists, hypocrites, and cowards” who support Castro (516).

Though there are such people who try to undermine Arenas, there are also many who help him. Professor Reinaldo Sánchez gives Arenas a job at the International University of Florida teaching Cuban poetry. There, Arenas connects with a community of exiled Cuban writers, most of whom live in poverty and are unable to publish their work because publishers doubt their prospective profitability.

Arenas quickly learns he dislikes Miami, claiming that the city feels like a soulless replica of Cuba. People invite him to parties just to gawk at him, the recent exile. Lázaro suffers another nervous breakdown. In August 1980, Arenas travels to New York to speak at Columbia University. He feels at home in the lively city, where he connects with a large group of friends including Toca, who Arenas forgives.

Arenas defines witches as women who played a crucial role in helping him throughout his life, oftentimes in seemingly magical ways. He first encountered witches in childhood through his grandmother, who conjured the images of peaceful sorceresses that later inspired his novel Singing from the Well. He identifies as a witch Maruja Iglesias, who against all odds secured him a job at the National Library in Havana, initiating his literary career. In New York, Arenas meets another witch: Alma Ribera. Ribera is witch-like in that she guides Arenas toward his destiny of living in New York by urging him to move into an apartment she finds for him.

Arenas also identifies evil witches who have plagued him. Malas is one because he “seemed to be in a constant state of levitation, twisted and insidious in character, misshapen of body (and thanks to whom I landed in jail, in one of the most Dantesque circles of hell)” (528). Toca is another in his appearance, betrayal of Arenas, and apparition in New York during Arenas’s visit.

After returning to Miami to finish teaching his course, Arenas moves to New York with Lázaro on New Year’s Eve, 1980. His arrival feels auspicious: His cabdriver is unusually generous in helping him move and snow is falling—a symbol of freedom for Cuban poets who wish to escape their country.

In 1983, Arenas and some of the other Cuban writers who fled during the Mariel Boatlift, including Juan Abreu, found and self-fund an irreverent literary magazine called Mariel. Mariel criticizes Cuban writers who support Castro and exposes the persecution of gay men in Cuba. The “deluxe communists” dominant in the Cuban literary diaspora and leftist intellectual circles pan the magazine, which folds after a few years; nevertheless, Mariel is a voice of freedom for Arenas and his friends.

Western publishing houses wanted to publish Arenas’s work while he lived in Cuba because there was prestige in publishing an author from a communist country. After Arenas escapes Cuba and begins publicly denouncing Castro, those same publishing houses begin dropping him and other anti-Castro Cuban writers. New York University drops these writers’ books, including Arenas’s, from its curricula.

Arenas spends his first three years in the US compensating for time lost under Castro. He travels, writes or rewrites six books, and speaks at dozens of universities. Arenas takes a spontaneous road trip throughout the US with Lázaro and two of their friends. In New York he enjoys a scene of sexual freedom reminiscent of Havana in the ‘60s, finding communities of gay men in Central Park and on the beaches.

In 1983, Arenas finally receives refugee travel documents from the UN that allow him to travel internationally. He travels throughout Europe with some difficulty: few want to accept the documents. Arenas interprets this reluctance as a prejudice against refugees: “A refugee is always a problem, because he might want to stay anywhere and generally does not have a penny” (560). After speaking at a number of universities throughout Europe, Arenas meets Jorge and Margarita in Madrid. He has not seen them since 1967, though they maintained a weekly correspondence. It is an emotional reunion. The three explore Madrid and Paris together in one of the happiest periods of Arenas’s life.

Through Lázaro, Arenas remains connected to his past life in Cuba: In Lázaro lives the hope of someday returning to a free Cuba. Lázaro is also one of the only people in New York who understands Arenas’s suffering under Castro.

In 1983, Lázaro is in a car accident and spends a month in the hospital. Following his release, he is soon admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he stays for months. After he is released, Arenas finds him an apartment and a job, and Lázaro’s mental state slowly improves. At Arenas’s encouragement, Lázaro writes and publishes a memoir about his experience as one of the exiles in the Peruvian embassy. Lázaro feels like a brother to Arenas, who regrets the loneliness to which he will abandon Lázaro when he dies of AIDS.

In 1983, the owner of Arenas’s building evicts his tenants to remodel and raise rents. Arenas is forced to move in a situation reminiscent of his constant moves in Cuba. He reflects that instead of being ruled by political power (as in Cuba), the US is ruled by the power of money. He sees New York as a soulless place without history: the new constantly replaces the old in the service of making money.

In 1985, two of Arenas’s close friends die. One dies of AIDS, which until that point had been a distant rumor to Arenas. Arenas realizes that he, too, could contract the disease.

Dreams and nightmares figure prominently in Arenas’s life. Preparing for bed is for him the process of preparing for a long trip to another world.

Arenas has a recurring nightmare that someone has tricked him into returning to Cuba. He dreams of death by suicide and the pain it will cause his family and friends. Mobs of rare tropical birds reappear in his dreams, infesting his body and preventing him from reaching his family or expressing himself.

One night in New York while reading in bed, an explosion suddenly sounds in Arenas’s room. He calls Lázaro (who had just left his apartment) to help search his room. Arenas fears State Security attempted to assassinate him: They have made numerous death threats and he sometimes finds that someone has broken into his apartment and looked through his papers. Arenas and Lázaro discover that the glass of water on Arenas’s nightstand has inexplicably exploded.

Weeks later, Arenas understands the exploding glass as an omen: “a premonition, a message from the gods of the underworld, a new and terrible message announcing that something truly different was about to happen to me, or was already happening” (591). Throughout his life, Arenas felt that a guardian angel, the Moon, protected him from numerous misfortunes and near-death experiences; the exploding glass symbolizes the destruction of that protection.

The final chapter is a sort of farewell note Arenas wrote after completing this autobiography months before his death by suicide, with instructions to publish it after his death. He explains that after three years of fighting AIDS to complete his life’s literary work—he even had to dictate this autobiography because sitting at a typewriter was too laborious—his health deteriorated to the point where he could no longer write or do anything else he enjoyed. He blames no one but Castro for his fate: “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” (595). Arenas encourages Cubans to not lose hope in their fight for freedom.