Before Night Falls

The shocking memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas "is a book above all about being free," said The New York Review of Books--sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels.

Reinaldo Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943. In the 1970s, he was imprisoned multiple times for being gay, which clashed with the beliefs of the Communist regime. Despite the hardships imposed during his imprisonment, Arenas produced a significant body of work, including his Pentagonia, a set of five novels written between the 1960s and 1980s that comprise a "secret history" of post-revolutionary Cuba: Singing from the Well, Farewell to the Sea, Palace of the White Skunks, Color of Summer, and The Assault. In 1980, he was one of 120,000 Cubans who arrived in the United States on the Mariel boatlift. Arenas, ill with AIDS, committed suicide in 1990 shortly after completing Before Night Falls. 

Before Night Falls - Reinaldo Arenas Introduction: The End The Stones The Grove The River School The Temple of the Spirits The Well Christmas Eve The Harvest The Downpour The Spectacle Eroticism Violence The Morning Fog The Night, My Grandmother The Earth The Sea Politics Holguíin The Rub Pub Christmas Rebel The Revolution A Student Havana Fidel Castro Hymns The Fire Theatrics and the Chicken Farm Raúl Good-bye to the Chicken Farm The Library The Cuban Book Institute The Four Categories of Gays Virgilio Piñra Lezama Lima My Generation A Trip Eroticism Jorge and Margarita Santa Marcia [Saint Queer] The Abreu Brothers Super-Stalinism The Sugar Mill Olga Andreu The Padilla "Case" A Trip to Holguíin Nelson Rodríguez The Wedding The Arrest The Flight The Capture Prison Villa Marista Again at El Morro An "Open" Jail Out on the Street The Monserrate Hotel Good-Bye to Virgilio Mariel Key West Miami Exile Witches Mariel Magazine Travels Madness The Eviction The Announcement Dreams Farewell